PIXEL ART

SIMPLE YET COMPLEX

Welcome to one of my favorite mediums, and something I have been working in since I was 13 years old. Pixel art is the first digital art medium that I ever had contact with. It has been around since graphical renditions could be displayed on a tube monitor. From the original Nintendo, to the Amiga personal computers, pixel art has been a staple to control not only color values and limited processing power, but to show graphical information to the world.

This art form has shaped not only the video game industry, but even UX design as a whole for IT. Icons on your computer are literally 48x48 pixels. The entire world interacts with this medium every day, and they are not even aware how important a role this medium plays.

Pixel art has also become a pretty niche art form. It is a timeless art direction for the game industry, and never seems to fully go out of style no matter how advanced graphics cards get. It is used in phone games, application, console indie ports, along with retro design in flyers, design themes, and many other areas.

Pixel art has a special place in my heart in the digital art medium, and I am always happy to do a project for a client in this style.

Game Assets for Hunatown

Another huge part of my work in pixel art is animation as well. In 2024, its actually pretty easy with motion tweening, AI assisted transitions, and generally complex applications that fill in the frames for you. Pixel art has a hard time handling these sorts of operations due to its absolute sizes.

For example, this progress bar I made for LevelUpLarry as a client contract, each frame, movement, effect, etc. was done by hand to make sure it was precise, and looked the way we wanted it to look.

This means every frame, was handmade and constructed, and adjusted as needed.

Not everything I have done is animation though, but A lot of the requested work usually asks for this type of medium. I have also done an insane amount of Twitch platform emotes for different clients over the years.

Not only is it pretty quick money, but each one personalized to the client and their needs. It is also challenging to work in 28x28 and only utilize those pixels to convey expression, intent, and translation over for what the emote represents, and what the client wants.

The results though if done properly is something that looks extremely crisp, because there is no downsizing the document to a smaller canvas size, as you are utilizing the 28x28 space per pixel value.

This is just a small example, as I have probably done well over a 100 different individual emotes for clients over the years.

LEVEL UP LARRY INTRO VIDEO

I am not even sure how long this took, how many frames, how many revisions, etc. but we got it done. One of my main clients is a partnered Twitch streamer, and he needed an intro.

We were very deep into the retro/pixel art look for the aesthetic and vibe of his stream, so we had this crazy idea to stand out from everyone else, and do an entire intro sequence for when he was about to come onto stream.

This is the video result of this.

I built the entire frames manually in Aseprite. Now if you know anything about that program, you would know what a feat of patience and determination it was to build out each and every frame, along with each and every scene.

Once we finalized the actual scenes, I would export/bake them out at different size variations so it could be ran through Adobe premiere and after effects for a bit of tweaking to align sound, music, and make sure everything matched up properly.

Below, you can see the individual scenes we set and worked on. I am taking a guess, that this project probably took me 3-4 weeks of constant work. Possibly 8-9 hours a day working on it for my client.

LevelUpLarry was pleased with the work, and we ran with it.

I originally did a rough sketch storyboard in stills before we even started working on this project.

We took inspiration and took nods to some particular games, era's of retro games, and other intros out there.

For the bubble sky scene, it was taken from Super Metroid from the SNES, and her ability where she bubbles to charge her energy.

The multiple beam idea, and the ultimate drop was taken from old 90s style anime and Akira specifically.

The forest was a bit of a pain to get proper, as we only had so much time to work on assets, so I tried to make the scenes feel a bit more alive and dense with forest trees, and make the bushes and grass move.

The landing part was obviously taken from Megaman as a reference, and the stance was taken from Terminator 2.

The whole idea was "Larry" jumping into his games, and slowly going to fight to become stronger, or "Level UP". Simple, but it worked.

This is where we see the first example of this.

Larry happens on some typical low level forest slimes and a boss slime that he decides to fight with magic.

We also wanted to make sure he was a spell caster, as his main classes he played in any fantasy game was always some sort of enchanter or wizard or sorcerer. So this was intentional to make him a spellcaster.

Adding the arcade numbers was my idea, as his main logo is a joystick.

The last scene is supposed to represent "Future Larry all leveled up" was the idea.

We wanted to cut to more scenes to show more progression, but we wanted to make sure the intro was not super long, and was easily usable for Twitch, and for Youtube videos at the time.

Again, we went with an upgraded wizard, and wanted to show a new staff (which we referenced from Everquest) and show higher spell power and a new outfit to convey he had looted and got stronger.

This project was quite the task if I'm being perfectly honest. I loved every moment of working on it, along with the freedom to make decisions to adjust things as we went along, it was definitely a learning experience, and I gained a lot of confidence and new skills from this particular project.

LevelUpLarry is not only a great client, he's also a very creative content creator. He gave me so much freedom, and was open to a lot of ideas on getting his intro to where he wanted it. This will always be a forever favorite project I've done in the last 6-8 years.

GAME DEVELOPMENT & PIXEL ART

I am not even sure where to start with game development & my work as a freelance artist in this space.

To even list the companies I have worked under, contracted, and finished the work, is complicated as much as the scope of those games were.

I am one of those freelance contractors that has fallen into the trap of doing the work, but the game always being cancelled. Now this is a pretty common thing that happens in the industry. It could be financial hiccups, a large bump in the road, bad scoping, or the developers just losing interest and going dark.

This is kind of where majority of my pixel artwork and game asset design sits, sadly.

I am going to show some work regardless, as that is the point.

The work to the right is just a small tidbit of the vast amount of tileatlases I have created, from top down, side scrollers, animated, world maps, Sci-fi themed, etc, etc.

Fairly old now, but I did end up participating in a Ludum Dare event in Victoria, BC. our game came in 2nd place, and It also got an honorable mention. 1st place winners were going to get mentorship for 3 months at a local mid level studio in the city.

I think the reason why our game got 2nd place was because I was the only pixel artist and animator in the large game development group. The game was about being a shark, and you would avoid harpoons from ships, eat scuba divers, and little fish as well.

It was a simple game (obviously, it was a 48 hour game jam) but we had music, sound effects, graphical layout, and a titlescreen that was not made in comic sans, so I think our game stood out because of these little things.

I feel versatility is a big factor in the work I do. I got over the gatekeeping "purity of pixels" a long time ago when I understood that time is the ultimate currency when working on projects where efficiency is key overall. This is why I job from program to program depending on what I need to get done.

I think its important that you can be able to do manual animation, and understand the fundamentals of animation from its primary form, but going into Spine2D or AfterEffects to get quicker results with motion tweening, keyframing, etc. is equally important for the work you are doing. Why draw every angle of a sword, when you can simply rotate it in a vector like state and upload to the engine? It is things like this that help with speeding up the process.

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