Credit: www.gimp.org
Think of retro games and you’ll probably think of the pixellated look of titles released on consoles such as the NES. Games such as Bomberman and Kid Icarus worked within the limitations of ’80s technology, yet offered hours of fun and iconic looks. The style faded into obscurity with the development of more powerful game consoles and 3D graphics, but has seen a recent renaissance in indie games such as Pepper Grinder (www.peppergrindergame.com). The art is still drawn pixel by pixel using a limited palette, but is much smoother thanks to careful shading and muted hues not available to ’80s game developers. One of the most popular uses of pixel art is in role-playing games based on an isometric grid. We’re going to create an example character (or sprite) for use in such a game.
If you fancy creating your own sprite or just want to use it as an excuse to fire up and learn how to use some of its tools, creating pixel art can be both fun and educational, and is a great way to pick up some skills. What’s interesting about pixel art is that to do it well, you need to go into your settings and adjust the canvas size, create a drawing grid for guidelines, tweak the drawing tools and ideally adjust and create a set palette. Before we actually create a character from scratch, we’ll first look at all that, plus some basics on shading,
