I barely have a clue. I’ve had this infatuation of learning pixel art for the longest time now so that I can make my own assets for games. Now that I’m actually trying to make a pixel art game, I realize how I underestimated how hard it actually is to learn to make decent “DECENT” pixel art.At first, I felt like when the time comes that I need to make assets, I’ll be able to whip out more than decent pixel art but then reality dick slapped me hard in the face.*insert winky face here*

So there’s this game with a pixel art A E S T H E T I C (kmn) called Kingdom and it’s a 2D side-scrolling strategy game where you as the king/queen defend your kingdom from hordes of trolls that are coming from the left and the right with walls and a BUNCH of archers with you.

It’s really fun and simple because it feels great watching arrows rain and small mistakes can snowball into your eventual loss and so that can add a lot of replayability to the game. The problem with the game though was that it was short. The game’s objective is to survive as many days as you can and that can get boring once you get the semi-optimal strategy. The tech progression is really short and there’s really room for more, a lot more. The units goes from builders, archers, farmers, catapults, royal knights and royal archers while the basic structures are farms, walls and archer towers and with all that acquired there’s nothing to spend all your gold with. The game is simple and fun and is good on its own but I want more and they released a sequel/remaster of the game (Kingdom: New Lands) but it’s not going in the direction I’ve imagined it go. I liked it but I still wanted more (demanding eh?) and won’that be a great reason to start your own game.

Here comes the problem:

How? Waht? Dafek1?! I can’t art… bre

I can barely make proper characters without copying the base model for the builder in kingdom and the colors are all over the place (Hey google why is my colors all over the place? Google: Cos you suck you piz of s#1t.)

So I thought I needed a theme to at least enclose the aesthetic then I decided “OH OH I’ll show my ‘love’ for the firipins (PH) by using folklore and tribal themes maybe even lapu-lapu”(Lapu-lapu is considered the 1st Philippine hero)

Now I think we have something interesting here. I’ll worry about the animation later, since I’m sure it’s “EASY”. For now I’ll need some environmental assets so that I can get on with the prototype with some half decent art. We’ll need a floor, some trees, some backdrops, clouds, bushes and grass.

Aaand shit comes out from the ground, goes into the fan, and went straight to my face again. I have no idea how to make textures so I can’t bring life to that sweet sweet baby boii brown ground soil (it’s all brown). My confidence that was shattered months ago (yes, I postponed the project for months) was now being rolled over by the Caterpillar 854K Wheel Dozer.

Just to get back on my feet, I started reading some guides on how to actually draw pixel art (I didn’t think I’d have to actually study for pixel art) and got these results.

Wow, it’s the power of reading, stealing and reference materials. A is the sprite they used for Kingdom and that’s what I wanted but not a copy. B was my first pattern that actually looked good but I can’t use it because it was too stony and there was something off with the lighting when I put the tribe units on top. C was an attempt on copying the style of A but was too similar. D was a simple transform of B to be more like the dimensions of A. Then I noticed with D that the stones on the top part were too small unlike the big clusters in A so I revised B to have larger stones on top resulting in E but it still didn’t look right so I gave up for a while and made F for Failure. An actual soil cross section image was referenced for F and now it looks like a skin anatomy diagram. And finally G was a retry of C which would look okay with some tweaks in color. Here’s the snapshots of each step which I can’t stop keeping when doing art.

This is the end of the blog and the start of me blogging my progress with learning pixel art. Thanks for reading and I hope you got something out of this. If you did, follow me to get notified for future blog posts buuutt if you didn’t then I’ll convince you now with the moral of the story, which is… click here.