3. Pixelart

Sketching was always my comfort zone. But pixel art was pretty new to me. And of course animation with pixelart was completly new to me.
I always wanted to learn animation but i never had a good reason to just start. But learning animation with pixelart was some of the most grateful and fun things to do.

Frames and Sprites

Most pixelgames run with a tiny amount of animated frames. You can have super detailed animation with tons of frames but you also can go with
- 4-8 frames for walking
- 2-4 frames for idle
- 1 or 2 frames for spawn and die
and maybe one more for shooting or stuff like this.
But first i had to learn to stop call it frames but call it sprites.

Fill the world with asset

I started with my first assets, simple animation sprites, backgrounds, characters and interfaces without a clear goal. There is so much to do when you start doing assets for your game without any restrictions. The idea was to create a whole world. So i need all kind of big stones, small stones, grounds, pillars, walls, industiral stuff, pipelines, lavarivers and on and on. There was no limit!

MAZK learns to walk

I was so proud of my first animated character! I had tons of ideas about his skillz, his spawn animation, how he is using cool glowing hacking gloves, a firewall with special effects and even a glitched version that could be used for anything. I had tons of ideas what i would love to see in a game with my character.

Next Up: 4.We have no gamedesign at all!

Thanks for following our journey. If you want to dig deeper or send us your thoughts, we’re always happy to talk about worldbuilding, pixel art, or game design quirks.

🎨 A project by Artur Fast + Simon Zeller