Tile-Thursday 7: 32 x 32 Volcanic/Barren Tile Set Progress 3

Hello everyone,

During the last week I've been experimenting and trying out a few ideas on the background. Usually I would try to use a slightly opaque or light colour to make distant objects. This time around - I decided to try out a new approach by adding a layer that darkens background objects to seperate them from the foreground. I definitely like the result!

Until next time,

Dylan

Tile-Thursday 6: 32 x 32 Volcanic/Barren Tile Set Progress 2

Hello everyone,

A small update for this week! Progress on the Volcanic / Barren tile-set is being made. I am enjoying working on this tile-set a fair bit up to this point! I worked on the tiles themselves for some variation and added a few decorative objects. 

Until next time,

Dylan

Tile-Thursday 5: 32 x 32 Volcanic/Barren Tile Set Progress 1

Hello everyone,

As I've mentioned last week - I've chosen to jump on making a different tile-set! Moving onto this next tile-set, I've increased the tile-size from 16 x 16 to 32 x 32 to give me more room to work with, and switch things around.

I started working on this tile-set more or less hap-haphazardly. I started with trying out a few ideas, putting things down and starting over a couple of times before I settled on something and decided to essentially just go with it and see how it comes out!

I'm not completely settled on the theme for this tile-set; although it's more or less a volcanic or barren type tile-set: based on the colours and ideas I have for it! 

I look forward to bringing you more updates!

Until next time,

Dylan

Tile-Thursday 4: 16 x 16 Desert Tile Set Progress 4

Hello everyone,

I haven't done too much towards adding onto the tile-set during the last week - between other work; I've had to make a few adjustments. That being said - I did re-work the sky backdrop primarily and made adjustments to the ground terrain.

I've decided to hop onto a new tile-set next; whilst this tile-set is far from finished - I've felt like excited working on this particular tile-set so to keep the spirit of practice going - I want to jump to work on something else!

I will show what I begin working on next week!

Until next time,

Dylan

Tile-Thursday 3: 16x16 Desert Tileset Progress 3

Hello everyone,

The tile-set is slowly coming along! I worked on a few more decoration tiles as well as adjusting the background and ground tiles a small amount.

At this point I'm trying to think of what style of tiles I wanted to go for. I was to go for some desert ruins and have tents that show signs of people exploring these ruins. Maybe go for a small desert treasure hunter type tile-set!

Until next time,

Dylan

Tile-Thursday 2: 16x16 Desert Tileset Progress 2

Hello everyone,

Progress on the desert tile-set is coming along nicely. The more consistent practice has been a refreshing change of pace from the consistent focus on a single project! I also look forward to writing these posts more and more as I make progress on the tile-set itself!

I have added a few basic decoration tiles, i.e. a ruined pillar and some sand stone bricks, together with an elevated terrain piece and background details. I plan on adding more and more decoration tiles; possibly going into a few full structures or the like! 

I do like how the tile-set is slowly taking shape to this point!

Until next time,

Dylan

Tile-Thursday 1: 16x16 Desert Tileset Progress 1

Hello everyone,

I have noticed that a lot of the posts I have been writing on Tuesdays have been involving Game Maker primarily; which is to be expected as I progress on projects. That being said - I do not wish to neglect other types of posts - as well as my other skill-sets; such as pixel art. These posts will likely be short - focusing primarily on the tiles themselves.

I have decided to start posting on Thursdays something I nicknamed Tile-Thursday. Every day, I will be working on creating at a minimum 1 tile. That 1 tile will form part of a major tile-set I will be working on for a while. Whether I decide to change tile-sets every month or a few months I have yet to decide on. However, the style will needless to say, need to be consistent whilst I am working on a particular tile-set. These tile-sets may be used in future projects, or I will simply have them on hand for prototyping. The intention here is to practice pixel art, even if I am currently not working with pixel art.

The first tile-set I decided to work on is a 16 x 16 pixel Desert tile-set. 

Up to this point I finished up a few basic floor tiles - however moving forward I have a few ideas on what I want to add - including elevating terrain, ruins, and natural features such as sand piles, and rocks! 

Until next time,
Dylan

Pixel Art 5: Piskel and Grey-scale Drawing

Hello everyone,

I recently discovered a new pixel art application that has proven to be quite useful - especially when the software I usually use isn't available. Piskel is both free and has most of the basic features you'd want to draw pixel art - I recommend checking it out, particularly if you want to have a web-based drawing software you can access from anywhere that you can access a browser!

After experimenting with Piskel - I also decided to try out a different style of pixel art. I decided to try out some grey-scale drawing and I immediately enjoyed it! The style is minimalist and the challenge of creating objects and representing lighting via only shades of grey was both entertaining and beautiful!

After I made the trees, I decided to create some rocks, and a cart. I made them as seperate tiles in Pyxel Edit and then experimented with the background and brought them all together to create the above image! I'm going to continue drawing more objects and adding onto the image and see what I can come up with!

Until next time,

Dylan

Pixel Art 4: Improvements

Hello everyone,

I am excited to show off what I have gotten done in the past week or so. I feel an improvement over what I did prior for sure. I feel like I have improved much more in tiles and terrain drawing, character wise there is still some practice I need to do with scaling body parts so they seem natural. Particularly if they are posed in a certain manner.

These are multi-layered tiles, you have the sky and background on a separate layer from the foreground; i.e. the grass and terrain. The tree did come out a little - small; though I think they still fit within the style. I am much prouder with them than I was with any of my earlier attempts at trees that's for sure. 

This next one started off as an attempt to make a character that has a more natural pose than my usual work. I wanted to give him something to carry - so I went with a torch rather than a staff or a sword; it gives me a reason to work with the lighting and shading some more. After I got the character done I figured why not try to give him a better background? Enter the cave.

This is the first attempt I had on giving a character a background and fit them into it. I chose a cave because it let me isolate the light source to the torch - though I for sure need to improve the background. I feel like the lighting going from light to dark is good - however adding detail on the cave wall and ground would definitely improve the piece.

I look forward to showing you what I work up next!

Until then,

Dylan 

Pixel Art 3: Progress Update

Hello everyone,

I have a few more works to show you. I do feel like I am improving, if nothing else I am getting more comfortable with pixel art - but there is definitely areas where I can do much better.

These are a number of snippets I took whilst drawing up this character. More or less, I took inspiration from Greek hoplites - particularly Spartans, except I also had Protoss (From Starcraft 2, for any of you that are interested) in mind so I decided to forego the normal skin colour and play with that. 

Outside of this - I also worked on a tile-set I am currently using for a Game Maker project as I learn the ropes. 

The game is an asteroids-like game though I decided to try out some exploration elements to help practice other parts of the engine such as the View points and coding opportunities that I would likely not meet with the base asteroids game. 

I will write and hopefully upload a version of the game on here later on!

Until then,

see you all next time!

Dylan

Pixel Art 6: Character States Improvement

Hello everyone,

So today I wanted to show you some more work I've done on pixel art - more specifically character states. I am quite pleased with the turn out - but there is much more to improve on. I used one of my older characters - bringing them more to live with different states!

Idle State

The character that I chose is the above - which displays him in his 'Idle' state. Basically when he is simply standing without the player's input. Next up is the movement state;

Movement State

I chose to start off with 5 frames. After I run a few tests in-game to see how it runs I will modify it and possibly add more frames if I think it would help in making the animation smoother. Overall I like how it turned out! Next we have the jumping and falling states;

Jumping and Falling

Some aspects I feel like could use some improvements is the sword - perhaps even adding a small bend to the waste to make the character feel more flexible. However overall - it turned out rather nicely. Next is a ledge grabbing state - the reason for this state is because in the game I will be testing this character in - the character will be able to grab onto ledges to climb!

Ledge Grab

Similar to the jumping state - I decided to bring the foot a bit forward to show the character holding onto the wall. I felt like bring the sword in as well helped with this. Finally - this isn't a state per se; it is an attack the character will be able to use.

Attack

I feel like that these were definitely an improvement over my last attempt at creating different animation states. The character feels more natural and looks far far better performing these actions than my previous attempt! I can't wait to see these in-game and see how they turn out after a few tweaks and improvements!

Until next time,
Dylan

Pixel Art 5: Character States and Tiles

Hey everyone,

It's been a while since I posted something about pixel art so I decided to do so this week. I have done little in the way of pixel art in the past 1 month since my focus was on HTML and Java; however I did make two items I wanted to show.

The first is a character I used to experiment and try to practice a little bit of states. I.e. Idle, Walking, Jumping and finally Crouching - or more like hitting the ground again after a jump.

The character is simplistic - I tried to not overcomplicate him since I was still going to decide how I would do the various states. For a first attempt - I am fairly satisfied. There are a number of obvious improvements of course - firstly being that the head remains consistently the same throughout.

I also worked on a few more tiles. I think if you haven't realised by now; tiles are quickly becoming a favourite of mine. I do need to start adding some complexity however - such as structures. The pillars came out fairly nicely - I hope to eventually add a type of ancient Greek structure and see how that comes out. I'll be sure to post it here when I do!

Until next time,

Dylan

Pixel Art 2: Pyxel Edit and Improvements

Hello everyone!

I will be bringing you a look into a new software which I have adopted for my pixel art work and I have found it has a number of useful features that help even those still getting used to pixel art and colours. 

Pyxel Edit

Pyxel Edit is a software aimed specifically towards pixel art. It is still in development, however as it stands at the time of this post you can purchase now at a lower price than the final release price. So I would recommend checking it out now rather than later and see if it's something that you will want.

What I found that got me to make the change to Pyxel Edit mainly is two features. Firstly, when you select a colour, there is a small side bar that can be opened from the Colour Wheel screen that shows you the various shades and lights of the chosen colour. This is not only extremely useful for help in getting used to the various shades of a colour but it also speeds up the drawing process since you wouldn't have to stay modifying the colour until you get the next shade.

Secondly, the Tiling System. Pyxel edit makes it much simpler to not only draw tiles but also lay them together to see how the final tile-set will look like. For example, you can draw a number of tiles which will be saved on the right-hand side (assuming you keep the interface configured as I did) which you can easily just select and click where to place that tile. What this allows you to do is create a number of tiles and make sure they not only line up but also look good together.

New Work

I feel like I am improving for sure, practice has become more fun as I improved. Though there is areas that I can improve in for sure - such as poses and character art, however with time and effort this will improve!

Character 1

Character 2

Characters 3

Castle Tiles

These are just a few works which I have done in the past few weeks using Pyxel Edit. I will likely use the castle tiles in a Game Maker project as I experiment on using it, perhaps for a small platformer or RPG.

I will post an update on Game Maker and various experiments and projects I do on Game Maker as I learn to use GML [Game Maker's Coding Language] and the Engine itself.

Until then,
see you all next time!
Dylan

Pixel Art

Hello everyone!

It's been a while since the last post, between University and practicing development - I had neglected to continue the blog. This time around - I'm looking to keep it going so long as my schedule allows, at least for the sake of reflection.

Together with RPG Maker VX Ace, I had been looking into pixel art. Likely many of you are already familiar with pixel art, if not, here are some examples of some I have made from practice. Needless to say I am a novice at this and I am still learning the ropes so to speak - but it should give you a good idea.

Character Sprites

These are a few character sprites that I have made that took roughly 5 minutes to 45 minutes to create for different ones. Needless to say, practice and persistence is important. As I come from a Business background, less so an Art's background, the challenge was bringing what I had in mind reflected in the pixel art. This gets easier I found as you get better at the skill, but techniques and practice coupled with some online tutorials that might give you a nudge in the direction that you are looking to move towards will help. 

The program I used to create these was Graphics Gale. Graphics Gale is a pixel arts software which I found to be very good for the task. It is designed towards creating pixel art, and on top of that, has a fairly cheap price of around 15 Euros. You can always give the trial a go to check whether the software is something you would like to purchase. You can, needless to say, use other software such as GIMP and Photoshop - I simply found this software fairly nice to work with, not to mention it comes with the added flexibility to help you animate using frames, which I have yet to toy with.

RPG Maker VX Ace Tile Sprites

(Many of which have heavy inspiration from various Default Sprites, some of which such as the crates were the default assets painted upon for practice's sake with regards to colors and shading)

In terms of tutorials I would recommend achebit on Youtube. His tutorials have aided me in getting the small nudges I needed to start trying out pixel art characters, something which I avoided for the longest time. Depending on what you are looking to learn and do with pixel art - whether it is characters, textures, tiles or scenery, there are numerous tutorials available online. Pinterest I found is quite full of them such as Shel Shel - Pixel Art Textures and Dibujo - Pixel Art Tree. So check these out if you are interested and feel free to share any other tutorials you found to be helpful!

That's all I have for now about Pixel Art, give it a try - it is really fun, and will be a major skill and asset to have should you ever try to develop a game using pixel art!

See you all next time!

Dylan