Pixel Art Illustrations and Animations

This is various art and animation creation I've created for a pixel-art dungeon crawling role playing game set in an urban environment. It is currently in the early stages of development.

In order to bring this project to life, I am wearing many hats: director, project manager, writer, user experience designer, artist, and animator.

Pixel Art Illustrations

Concept, Branding, Animation, Pixel Art, UI/UX

Company

Cayman Santoro Design

Tools

Aseprite, Gamemaker, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects

Role

Creative, Game, and Art Director

The Challenge

Creating a video game from scratch is hard. There are many components that go into it: graphics, art direction, animation, sound effects, music, programming, and everything else with it so it can work. Even if you’re able to complete all of those steps there is an additional challenge, and probably the most important one… is it fun to play?

Inspiration

A particular genre I had grown up playing was the classic dungeon crawler, where you move around a grid from a first-person perspective and can only do 90-degree turns. The limited movement made me feel like I was tactfully deciding how to explore the dungeon.

I’ve beaten almost all the classic dungeon crawlers, but it's an under-utilized genre and there aren’t many new titles. I had a dream game in mind that featured slick pixel art animation, good humor, an engaging story, and a heart-pumping soundtrack — but it just did not exist. So I'm making it come to life.

Classic first person exploration is grid-based featuring 90 degree turns as seen in the DOS video game, Eye of the Beholder

Creating the art

As a lover of pixel art, I wanted to utilize the techniques that developers of the 90's had utilized and I very quickly discovered drawing pixel art is very different as compared to traditional art.

In pixel art, you have total control and can manipulate every pixel yourself. Advanced tools will not do the job. Of course, that makes your artwork sharper because you don’t have the soft blur from paintbrushes. However, pixel art is not just about the tools.

Learning techniques is equally as important to get good results and work faster. This required a lot of research and practice to perfect the look I was trying to achieve in my head. Pixel Art was born from limitations of the technology available at the time, but to achieve that retro-look, you have to limit yourself with palette sizes, limited color palettes, and a host of other challenges.

Now you take those precise pixels, and now you have to animate them over a lot of frames. Traditional animation techniques can still apply, but Pixel Art can come with a slew of shortcuts and other challenges when making animations.

Clean-up animation with additional details

Rough animatic

The Game

Drawing inspiration from classic Dungeon Crawlers such as Eye of the Beholder, Shining in the Darkness, and Dungeon Master. This game hopes to take those classic elements, and bring them to a modern audience with unique elements, while also honoring the past.

You would follow a young hero named Lane. Along the way, you'll battle various foes, encounter strange and interesting characters, and explore mysterious urban and hostile environments, while uncovering puzzles and solving riddles.

As I continue development, I’ve improved my skills in pixel art and animation and the vision for the game has grown larger. Success will look like a game that people enjoy and want to play.

This game serves as my love-letter to the 16-bit era games that I grew up playing, and the skills I’ve gained from becoming an indie developer continue to serve me well as a designer in these modern times.

Takeaways