Sprites and Pixel Art

I started off having the player as a white square as I was figuring out how to add abilities and change code around. It didn't take long though before I really wanted to draw up a player sprite with movement animations for some of the actions I was developing. The suit design always had the fishbowl helmet, but went through tons of little tweaks to the shape and colors, though I found out pretty quick that there isn't a whole lot of room when you commit to the player sprite being only 32x16 pixels. I settled on the pretty simple orange and blue with a grey and green blaster. It felt like if I tried to add anymore detail, it would just muddy up the look of the character.

The walk cycle and other animations from player abilities were a lot of fun to draw. I've had a little experience with flash animation in the past, and there are a lot of good resources for pixel art animation. One of my favorite's is a video series by Dan Root called Video Game Animation Study. He covers animation concepts in detail through examples in classic and modern video games. It's been a solid resource and a fun series to learn from.

The environment design has been a little tougher to get to a look that I'm happy with. On the one hand, I could draw unique and super detailed backgrounds for each room, and end up spending a year or more one it. That was my plan originally. But on the other hand, this is just a hobby game that I'm doing to learn some programming, and if I end up spending 75% of the project drawing, I'll probably start to lose motivation. I enjoy drawing pixel art, but my game map has ~120 rooms, and I'd rather reuse a handful of backgrounds and change the tint/brightness instead of cutting down on the number of rooms.

The tile art has been another interesting challenge. I've started by building the frame of the level in plain blue tiles, then replacing the tiles with the detailed ground or ceiling or whatever art tiles I've drawn up for the level. I have pretty much decided to go with a layout where the edge of a surface will have three tiles, fading to black, and then filling in any space you can't get to with black. I had originally planned to have the whole screen covered in tiles, instead of fading to darkness, but I couldn't get a look that I liked that didn't appear too messy. My hope with this style is to create a sense of claustrophobia for the player as they explore some of the more narrow corridors.