robotriot

Pixel-Sci-Fi illustration and steps below.

My first proper picture compatible with the restrictions of the KC85/2 computer’s graphics mode: one foreground and one background colour per 4×8 pixel block.

The intro of Moonstone is nothing special on a technical level, but I feel it’s simply one of the classics that has to be included here. After a long scroll from the moon over some gigantic trees all the way to ground level, we see a bunch of cloned druids gathering in Stonehenge. A knight joins the party and receives his blessing for the quest that is to follow. The pixelart is nothing special, a lot of monochrome palettes were employed to clearly seperate all the different elements like the robes, trees and rocks. The shading is very simple for the most part, and the ground and wood contain a little too much random noise for my likeing. Still, the game was pretty fun (although I never got very far.) Considering a lot of great games don’t have any intros at all, this one here makes Moonstone all the more enjoyable. (Video after the jump)
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This is probably one of the finest intros on the Amiga. Byte Engineers put together a very long sequence for this sci-fi RPG which shows our protagonist activating his team of droids and meeting with a fellow conspirator out in the countryside. The technical level of  the pixel art you will see is really top notch. One of the artists involved was Herman Serrano, who is one of my heroes when it comes to title screens. Check out his work on Exile or Wreckers for example. You can spot his signature in some of the scenes in this intro as well. The animation is often very minimal, as the artists apparently couldn’t be bothered with creating real rotations for objects, so it’s mostly just 2D sprites sliding around. But some of the animation is really well done in my opinion, for example the keypad that fades in and out of the desk or the slight fake camera rotations in the scene in the woods near the end. Oh, and the CD32 version here has full speech! Well, it’s not the best acting ever, but video game were never known to have great voice acting anyway. (Video after the jump)

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It’s been a long time since I last pixeled something. Well, I finally got off my lazy butt and made this, a kind of by-product of the work I’ve done for my thesis so far. I’m not sure if it’s 100% finished yet, maybe I’ll update the image at some later point in time.

Finally a post with some art again. These are sprites I created for Tibia ME during my internship. Also: happy new year!

This tutorial demonstrates the settings and steps you have to take to configure Photoshop for pixeling. I originally published it on my website, however I think it’s better suited here for the blog. I also updated it a little and added a small bit about the crude animation capabilities of Image Ready. Feel free to post any questions here concerning the tutorial or pixeling in general.

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This tutorial doesn’t have that much to do with actually creating pixel art, but it’s aimed at artists smaking pixel graphics for games. It will show you how to create the best possible tilesheet layouts, without wasting any space in the image file, which is especially useful for mobile phone developers where every byte counts.

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Ok, this is the last one for now, I promise. Not that anyone cares anyway.

I have been thinking about the purpose of MS Paint. Yes, it’s nice to have a primitive way of quickly creating something graphical when there’s no “real” software installed. Yes, I know you can actually do awesome pixel art with Paint. Yes, I am aware of The Power of Paint. However I’m pretty sure that 97% of the time, MS Paint is used for one purpose and one purpose only: slapping crappy, waggly mouse-drawn lines in glaring 0xff0000 over photos, screenshots and maps, usually padded with gigantic JPEG artefacts. Most of the time, it’s an arrow.

Call me guilty as charged.

PS: Yes it’s actually 0xff7e00, I know.