Hello there! As promised, this is my post detailing the development of my submission to the Pixel Challenge #2. Here is the finished result:

But before that, a little introduction!

“Blue Fire” is the code name for a game idea I’ve had on my mind for years. It first began as a simple short story, but since then it developed into a far more complicated idea. It tells the adventures of a special group of Samurai during Feudal Japan. They are sent on a regular mission of reconnaissance, but turns out it stirs up far more than what they initially thought. I want it to be fairly historically accurate but with a bit of folklore and fantasy mixed in.

Also, I want to make it an action RPG, but since this is a throwback to older games, I figured I’d try my hand at emulating the old school type of RPGs, with turn based tactics and characters in static positions in the battlefield.

Little disclaimer before we start!

All pixel art seen here is at twice their original size. Also, each “day” here represents roughly 3 to 4 hours at night (the time I could spare off from chores and my day job).

On to the Development, then!

There were quite a few things I wanted to restrict myself to do from the get-go. I knew I wanted the characters to be 32 pixels wide and tall (not counting appendages such as weapons or hats) since I had such little space. My first try at pixel art was done with 16 pixel characters (this is my third try), but I figured it was time to experiment with a new size and see how it would look like. Wouldn’t be a challenge if I didn’t learn anything from it, now would it?

My first try at pixel art, from almost 2 years ago, for Golden Eggs (16 pixel wide and tall).

My second and more recent try: an avatar for me (32 pixel wide and tall).

Day 1

This is what I ended up with on the first day. I started with a rather wonky body proportion experiment, but after tinkering with it a little bit, I finally managed to get a good sense of body proportions. The next few attempts were to try and get a sense of the arms and legs. Also, I made a character with a kimono, but ended up just ignoring it and trying to pose it and see how it looked. I was liking the results so far.

Day 2

The second day was far more productive in terms of things done, since the body experiment part was mostly over. I ditched the dark lineart at the very beginning of day 1, but realized that with only 4 colors to choose from, not having it would mean chaos when defining the various parts of the body, especially if they intersected. Thus, it came back. At a price though: I had to cut the body 2 pixels short in order to accommodate these changes, since I still needed to make room for the hair. A few more experiments on posing (and also face expressions) and I was happy enough to start working on the sprites themselves. I decided to also make the male template at this time (second row), which ended up being just a flat chested woman, but was good enough for the job.

The first character I started doing was Mayu, the 2-handed swordsman. I figured hers would be the most difficult pose to make, due to her stance grabbing the sword. Her arms turned out to be hard to nail up, and were the defining factor to bringing lineart back.

I also started doing Haruna, the resident mage. I knew I wanted her to fly to distinguish her from the other spellcaster in the party, but wasn’t able to do much. I liked the kimono I did for her when standing on ground, but on air it seemed rather wonky and out of place.

Day 3

Continuing on the work of the past day, I finished Haruna. I decided to take her starting pose and make it seem more like she was flying by leaning her legs and making her clothes be blown by the wind. In the end, I also changed the arms to give way for a more dynamic pose. The result was very different from the original, but turned out better I think.

Ayano is the second spell caster of the party, a Shinto priestess. I wanted her pose to be neutral and non-aggressive, and wanted her to be casting something. Her pose was really hard to pull off, since it was so compact, but after a few tries, I finally found one I was happy with.

Next came Rokuro, the Samurai archer. I nailed his pose at the first few tries, and he has probably the most straight forward character to make. I had a friend critiquing me, and eventually he gave me the idea to change his arrow to a single line to take away some clutter from his silhouette. Turned out much better! After finishing him, I revisited Mayu and gave her some protection on her legs to distinguish her as the most armored warrior of the group.

Finally I did Yoshiro, the resident dual-wield speedster. After deciding on his pose, which didn’t take very long, doing his robes was a fairly quick job as well. I took Mayu’s sword (on the left, fifth row) and used it as a template for his long and short swords.

I had finally finished all 5 main characters. The time had come to take them to the template to see how it looked!

Not bad! Still had a long way to go, but things were starting to come together nicely!

Day 4

I also needed some enemies for our heroes to fight, of course, and the story demanded a few undead! I figured Skeletons would be the most iconic thing to do, so I took the human template and made it a little more lean and pale. I tried to come up with a few heads, but they ended up rather wonky, so I left the original design stand. Gave them a few weapons (stolen shamelessly from the heroes) and they were good to go!

I took them back to the template and it looked good! I also started doing the interface and the background, though I didn’t finish them.

Day 5

A day reserved for the small details. I looked at the piece for a few minutes and made a list of things I wanted to change.

The first was the swords. They looked reversed somehow! I changed their topology slightly and gave them a more appropriate highlight.

I changed the values of health and AP to random values, to make it more authentic. This brought up another problem I hadn’t thought of: when the health bars were not fully filled, the numbers became hard to see. I had to ditch my initial idea of putting the numbers inside the bar itself for another solution that read better. I also changed the letters’ color to the darkest one available to contrast more with the light color of the background for readability’s sake.

In other interface touch-ups, I also added a small turn bar at the top of the second screen to convey information of who would act next.

Finally, I finished up the background, which was by far the biggest and the most time consuming change. My critiquing friend gave me the idea of putting them on a road, and I ended up painstakingly doing every tile (even those covered by the characters) by hand. Took a long time but I think it really helped the whole scene come together. Also, I added some bamboo behind the brushes (which I also ended touching up) to give it a more Asian flair.

And it was done and submitted!

Day 6

As an exercise, after submitting I decided to make two variants of the interface: one for Japanese (since it’s where it takes place, after all) and one for Portuguese (my mother tongue). Huge thanks to a friend of mine who helped me with the translations for the Japanese variant!

And there you go! Hopefully you liked this little article, and it gave you some helpful insights! Thank you so much for reading, and I’ll see you next time!