Hi! Today I'm going to talk about my journey with pixel art and some of the experiences I have had while making my own assets.
So, for my project I knew I wanted to challenge myself and create all of my assets, music, sprites, buttons, all of it. However, I have had to cut back and most likely will not be making any music for my game, ( I might reuse an old one that I made in the past) but I do intend to create the rest of the assets. So far I have more sprites for my game than I can remember. Those sprites include, animated enemies, collectible items, breakable bricks, world backgrounds and so on.
Pixel art is something I gained interest in in the first year of university, so you can say I'm very much a novice, but through my final year project I believe I have improved enough to be called an intermediate pixel artist. Pixel art itself can be very simple, but to progress and create depth you have to have an understanding of lighting and shading. I'm not that bad at drawing so I am at an advantage when it comes to that, but pixel art is sometimes not as easy as it looks. Over the course of this project I have spent hours upon hours pondering on the sizes of sprites and backgrounds. My friend told me that I am able to change the size in unity (which was true in the end) but I had tested it out and for some reason my sprites were almost deforming (as the pixels reduce so does the resolution of the sprite) as I changed its size, which made me a little anxious and made me waste even MORE time on figuring out sizes for my sprites. I learnt that it's good practice to keep your sizes in multiples of two so 16x16, 32x32, 64x64 and so on. At first I even thought you couldn't stray from the sizes that were given by the pixel drawing app, which I later learnt was not the truth.
The majority of the sprites that I have made started off as concept art, sketches of what I'd like everything to be, but I have learnt that translating sketches into pixels can be get challenging. For my game I knew I wanted to go somewhat simple with the art because obviously, I also have to code the game. I wouldn't have time to draw and animate excessively detailed sprites, but what I did not take into consideration (going back to sizes again) is the amount of pixels I would need to work with to have some detail. I intended to work on a 16x16 canvas, having the most simple sprites possible, but that genuinely caused me distress because there was barely any room for the smallest amount of detail, which made the sprites look lifeless and flat. There are artists who make sprites at that size and make them look very impressive, but at my skill level it wasn't possible. The sketches I had made had circular shapes, bends and curves that just were not possible at that pixel size, which thus started my pixel size pondering era. I had tried importing my sketches into the pixel app, but honestly, it made matters worse because at that point I was working with thousands of pixels which definitely was too big and too detailed for what I was going for. I had also realised that two of the sprites I had planned are definitely not possible in the small pixel size that I Intended to work with. After pondering some more and trying out multiple things, I decided to work on a 32x32 to 64x64 canvas for the majority of my sprites. I don't use the entirety of the canvas for all of my sprites so they vary in size, but at that pixel amount I am able to create detailed sprites while also keeping them at a somewhat small size. After all this stress, I found out that it's possible to resize sprites in unity without conpressing the sprites and losing detail. Very sad.
But yeah, that's a little bit about my history with pixel art and my experience.
Thanks for reading!
Dabrina
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