I’m a game developer, but you don’t get many finished games from me. Pixel Art Academy is the longest project I ever embarked on and while I regularly release alpha updates, it will probably take another decade to wrap the game up (check out my video I made a text adventure in 5 years (with 10 more to come)).
There is, however, a game jam happening every now and then when I take the opportunity to work on something small and bring it to completion. This past weekend I took part of the 48h-long GMTK Game Jam. After not much sleep, our team of three submitted a build of RetroCop, an FPS where you have to survive an onslaught of ghosts in a maze that is constructed and destroyed as you play.
The theme of the jam was “joined together”, so the rooms procedurally join and break apart. The game is also pretty much Doom+Tetris+PAC-MAN joined together (with Tron+RoboCop on top for the art style). I was happily surprised how entertaining the game is and the short, unforgiving play sessions make you want to try again and again.
The programmer put a bit of a crazy mouse sensitivity into the submitted game jam version (which you can try in the browser), so I made a new build yesterday with some more fixes and goodies squeezed in (menu music, dynamic mini-map location, better ghost hitbox). If you want to give the new version a try, you can download it for macOS, Windows, or Linux.
There are few topics more divisive in the (pixel) art world right now than NFTs, save perhaps for the decades-long debate what even is pixel art and whether the use of dithering should be a punishable offense or not.
Nobody has the full data on NFTs’ impact, and if the world ran on 100% renewable energy, maybe the whole debate would end up leaving just a lot of people confused why anyone would want to pay astronomical prices for digital ownership of something that can be perfectly replicated. Alas, all we can do now is read articles on environmental issues and glowing success stories, followed by a bit of a headache and an individual decision that is more ideological than we’d like.
While I’m personally not on board of the NFT train, what I am hyped about is all the amazing pixel artists we’ll get to hear from during the Pixel Art NFT Week, happening online from today, June 14, till Friday, June 18. You can see some familiar names above, with many more visible on the event’s website.
The sessions happening are:
Monday: Artist Chat: It Starts With Pixels
Tuesday: SQUARED Gallery Opening
Wednesday: WHALE Community Interview
Thursday: WHALE Community Text Chat
Friday: Artist Chat: The Future Is Pixels
The opening chat (today at 11AM PDT, 8PM CEST) will be conducted on Twitter Spaces (i.e. Twitter’s Clubhouse-like live audio platform). Other gathering locations include Discord and an online (+ VR) metaverse gallery. For details, see the full schedule, and follow daily notifications on Twitter.
The contrast between the two events was quite stark, from AAA games focused mostly on shooting and fighting, to Indies much more favorable to exploring and interacting with worlds in a peaceful manner. Both parts had some pixel art to show however, so let’s dive right into them.
Metal Slug Tactics
The Metal Slug series is the golden standard for 90s smooth pixel art, and a reference for animators until this day. Not sure who is wrangling the pixels on the new turn-based strategy title, but they sure are living up to the original’s expectations. Check out more screenshots and wishlist it on Steam.
Axiom Verge 2
Axiom Verge 2 was the first of the games featured in the Day of the Devs section and is a spiritual successor to the highly apraised metroidvania, offering a completely new world and characters.
Garden Story
If you ever wanted to play a game as a grape, your time has come! Garden Story is an action-RPG that follows the community-building vibes of many indie titles since Stardew Valley.
ElecHead
Coming from the Japanese coworking space Asobu, ElecHead sports a striking 4-color palette and a protagonist that charges any platform it touches, changing the game world in the process.
Loot River
It’s hard for me to not get excited about water shaders, and if they’re combined with a pixel art aesthetic … There’s a reason Kingdom is one of my favorite series. Add to that Loot River, a dungeon crawling action roguelike with what appears to be even some Tetris inspiration thrown in.
If you, like me, in the past tried to find games that don’t have violence/fighting as one of their main game mechanics, it was hard to know what to put into the search field to get your idea across … until 2019 when Matthew Taylor started curating “uplifting, thoughtful, compassionate, cozy video games” on Twitter under the name Wholesome Games.
It turned out he was far from the only one who wished to find more positive gaming titles. The Wholesome Games community quickly grew, leading up to a showcase in 2020 called Wholesome Direct—an online alternative and answer to many physical events like E3 getting canceled that year. Wholesome Direct was welcomed by over 140,000 viewers and was essentially a half an hour of videos of wholesome games weaved together with two hosts and the games’ developers introducing their trailers.
Following a couple of smaller showcases—Wholesome Snacks—in August and December last year, Wholesome Direct is back for its second run coming up this Saturday.
More than 70 games will be shown and—just like last year—we can expect a bunch of them to be presented in lovely pixels, voxels, or low poly pixel art. The whole lineup is hush hush since it includes some first-time reveals, but from those announced, the ones with low-resolution raster art include Moonglow Bay and Yokai Inn.
My Twitter feed also tells me Cheekynauts’ Moonshell Island will be showcased!
I’m so excited for this and all the other games in all the wonderful art styles and cozy colors!
You can tune in too this Saturday, June 12 at 10 AM Pacific, 7 PM Central European Time, on YouTube or Twitch, as well as follow Wholesome Games everywhere on the web.
I first came across the action RPG Year In The Trees when I moved to Sweden and heard about Stugan, an incubator program that ran here from 2015–2018. For two months over the summer, game developers from all over the world would come together to work on their games in a cabin in the middle of Swedish nature. In 2018, Chris ‘Luno’ Smith was one of them—fittingly so, as his RPG is pretty much about living in a cabin in the middle of an enchanted forest.
Luno, started the project back in 2016 and it’s been wonderful to see his high-bit art style get polished over the years into the smoothness it has today. Combined with the music and ambience worthy of his musician background, we get a world that is as mysterious as Wizard Fu’s Songbringer and pleasant as ConcernedApe’s Stardew Valley (coincidentally two other games with solo devs that also did their own soundtracks).
In April we got the above vlog that gave us a closer look at the current state of the game and the kind of crafting/survival gameplay to expect. There are no release plans yet (or Steam pages to wishlist), but you can sign up for a newsletter on the game’s website or follow Luno’s updates on Twitter.
Since Lospec launched in 2017 with its limited-color palettes list, the site quickly grew into the best resource for digitally restrictive art as it elegantly calls art forms such as pixel art, voxel art, ASCII/ANSI, low-poly 3D, chiptune and anything else digital that purposefully uses restrictions, often inspired by technologies of the past.
After adding an extensive database of pixel art tutorials and many other features such as an online pixel art editor, a merch shop, and user accounts, the site’s creator Sam ‘@skeddles’ Keddy would like to go into full-time development on the next big feature, the Lospec Gallery.
The idea is to have all the pixel-art-specific features of galleries such as Pixel Joint (sharp pixels with integer magnification scales), but open to everybody without purist requirements, as well as extended to other digitally restrictive artworks that also lack a dedicated place on the web.
Check the video on top for details or hop directly over to the Kickstarter campaign where you can show support for this very much welcome effort for our community. The project’s base funding has already been reached, but plenty of stretch goals remain for things to get even better (2021 release date, 3D and audio display types, personal portfolios, collaboration features, an API …).
Norma2D (@norma2d) has been one of my favorite artists to watch in 2020, so it’s fitting to end the year with a post of her wallpaper pack she released 2 days ago on itch.
It’s been a highly prolific year for Norma2D, further evolving her style of thinly hatched cluster transitions, a stylized dithering aesthetic I closely associate with her works. The atmospheric sci-fi setting further brings her works together, making this wallpaper pack a must-have.
It’s pretty much like my Retronator Magazine articles, but in the new Study Guide pixel art format (including the nice fullscreen previews I wrote about last time). So expect a lot of images, some text, and hopefully a very good time exploring it all.
If you want to support creation of freely-available learning resources, you can also contribute to the project on Patreon.
Sharp-eyed readers of the Retronator blog will of course know this feature since it’s been the way of viewing images on the blog for a few years now. You might also know it from my Pixel Dailies Archive where it was first implemented.
In any case, I’ve finally taken some time to improve the design and make it as it was originally intended: with a dithered gradient and automatic scale detection so that the artworks can be displayed with the appropriate integer magnification.
I’ve written previously about my pet peeve of how shitty it is to view art on the internet so it makes me happy to bring my approach of displaying art to more places in my work. For a full preview of where the new displays appear, check out my Patreon devlog.
(All artworks are from the Jaggies chapter of the Low-Resolution Raster Art book of the Study Guide. Click on the images above or see the article for credits.)
Freshly launched on Kickstarter, Dwerve is a tower defense-dungeon crawling combo with a lovely, smooth pixel art style. We’ve seen the tower defense mechanic mixed previously in Aegis Defenders (a platformer), but this time we get to experience it in an RPG with a ¾ top-down look and plenty of action.
A bunch of well-known pixel artists have ties to the project. Leonard ‘Sun Pixels’ Leon is behind the wonderfully big dialog portraits, Enchae does various stuff from enemies to environments, but most of all, Dwerve is shaped under the hands of Peter 'Pixel Pete’ Milko, who has a substantial following on his very educational YouTube channel. Besides him, Percy 'PJ’ Legendre is responsible for designing (and also coding) their brain child to life.
It makes me very happy to see the Kickstarter campaign already funded, which will move PJ and Pete from 2 years of previous development (on the side of freelancing) into full-time status. If you’re into action RPGs with a bunch of strategic defending and towering and storytelling to go with it, you can support the project on Kickstarter ($15+ for the game, macOS, Windows, Linux, with stretch goals for additional platforms).
Pixel Art Academy 5-year anniversary happened last week and to commemorate the occasion I created a video retrospective of the development so far. It offers insights into solo game development and why it takes so long to make a game on your own, especially an ambitious one.
Together with it, a trailer for Pixel Art Academy: Admission Week was released, showing the main gameplay features of the game in its current alpha version.
A longer, 10-minute version that shows all of the features can also be found on my Patreon page.
The final piece of news is that Pixel Art Academy’s art curriculum will be making its way into a real-life school for indie game development called The Indie Quest. It’s offered to students here in Sweden, but also to everyone who joins Spelkollektivet, the biggest coliving space for game developers where the school is taking place (and where I live). So yeah, exciting things ahead for Pixel Art Academy and me (and maybe you too if you join :)).
Don’t get fooled by the 3D characters in the thumbnail, the above is a 30 min lecture on pixel art with emphasis on animation of bigger characters titled Animation Bootcamp: High Resolution Pixel Art and Animation. It was given at the Game Developers Conference in 2018 by @kylebunk, and the recording just got released on GDC’s YouTube channel last week.
If there are any old-school tumblr folks in the audience, you’ll remember Kyle from the 2015–18 years when he shared a lot of smooth, long-duration character animations, specifically of Overwatch characters.
His GDC talk goes over his art background and the whole animation process, touching on many subjects like poses, time spacing, sprite reuse, and cleanup. A very useful overview if you’re just starting with animation, with plenty of tips and tricks if you’re looking to do big characters.
Everyone seems to be working on their own pixel art editors these days, specialized for one or another trick to optimize game asset production (or just because it’s fun :)). Dan Fessler’s been teasing new features of IndexPainter, a native implementation of his HD Index Painting scheme, ENDESGA has open-sourced the development of his minimal EDGITOR, and now the latest tool that came across my radar is Nevercenter’s Pixelmash.
The main feature that Nevercenter showed already back at the end of 2018 is non-destructive layer transforms, allowing for easy rigged animation. Plenty of features made it into Pixelmash since then, but the basic premise is that the software allows mixing of pixel and HD layers, the latter of which get subsequently pixelized. This allows for turning high-res shapes (of sub-pixel precision, relative to the end result) into much cleaner outlines when brought to low resolutions. Further, layer effects such as clean procedural outlines that get applied as the last step keep that feel of manual pixel crafting.
A time-limited demo is available on Pixelmash’s website to test the tool and if it seems useful to your projects, you can get a full license for $25 (macOS, Windows).
Retronator the blog is exactly 10 years old right now (+ an hour or so more since I can’t seem to stop editing this post)!
I want to take this opportunity to look back at the teenage years of the 21st century and reflect on how the pixel art scene has grown over the years. I only promise a personal perspective, pieced together from my faulty memory and a bit more reliable archive of 1,700 posts on this blog.
2010
Social media sites emerged already in the late 2000s (Facebook launched in 2004, Twitter in 2006, Tumblr in 2007), but it took quite some time before they caught on, especially outside the US. I joined Tumblr in July 2010 and there were relatively few pixel artists active on the site. @jinndevil and @unomoralez go the farthest of those that I followed. The first post I reblogged was a Back to the Future piece from @megapont (via some blogpost share, since Megapont duo didn’t join till 2013).
What was huge on the network however was sharing retro-gaming artworks by blogs like @it8bit and @gameandgraphics. This included many pixel art pieces and it helped grow a community of fans that adored both old games and pixels.
The 10th anniversary of Retronator (the blog) is coming up tomorrow!!! I’ll write a special post for the occasion then, but I thought it’d be interesting to see the most liked and reblogged posts I published on Retronator over these 10 years.
1. The United Pixels of America: 8-bit Map of the USA
Compared to other top 10 posts that have been gathering notes for half a decade already, the feature of Danc3r’s detailed, animated map of the United States is pretty much a baby. Still, Tumblr did what Tumblr does best and showed that even in the post-NSFW-apocalypse years of 2019/2020, there are plenty of fans of gaming, art, and pixels (and USA) alive on the site.
2. Paul Robertson artist feature
October 2014, 17k notes
Speaking of the NSFW apocalypse, the feature of @probertson’s work didn’t make it past the nude filters. Even though nudity in art is allowed on tumblr and they’ve been very good at restoring wrongly tagged posts in the past, Paul’s boobies-filled artworks somehow didn’t get approved. So yeah, no link for this post.
This tutorial tried to condense all the basics of how to get started with pixel art into just 7 images (and seven accompanying 10 sec videos). I later extended it into the Getting Started Guide and eventually turned into gameplay of my game Pixel Art Academy.
There were times when Fool a.k.a. Yuriy Gusev didn’t need an introduction on the pixel art scene. But it’s not the 2000s anymore, so to all of you who haven’t come across his work yet, he’s one of the very best pixel artists of all time, period. Well worth exploring his work.
I wrote a longer article about @waneella to accompany this post in Retronator Magazine, where I covered her journey from spaghetti-legs Lost Vikings to emerging themes of city skylines that hinted at the magnificent urban illustrations we know Waneella by today.
@valenberg is well known for his cyberpunk pixel arts and the GIFs he did for YouTube videos of musician Amplitude Problem lended well to the GIF-loving Tumblr crowd. Just recently, Valenberg’s game VirtuaVerse came out, so definitely check that out.
I posted about many pixel art games on this blog and the one that was shared the most was Inglenook’s @witchmarsh. It’s now been 6 years since its Kickstarter and we’re still patiently waiting for our beloved 1920s jazz-era RPG. Good things are worth waiting for! Also, their tumblr devlog is still actively updated, so good job guys.
Second (and final) game on this list is The Last Night, the winning entry for the CyberPunkJam, made by brothers @timsoret and @adrien-soret. You might have heard about it … Well, at least the full game that went into development following the prototype’s very positive reception. Seeing the old GIFs now, it’s just crazy to think how far the art direction has been advanced (and I’m sure we haven’t seen anything yet as even the trailer is 3 years old by now).
Finally another post that’s not from what seems to be the 2014–2015 golden area of this blog. People like rocks, I guess, and the trio of tutorials—including one from the incredibly popular Pedro Medeiros of @studiominiboss—served some good knowledge on the topic.
This is the post that started the whole Artist Feature series, so I guess I have Vierbit’s insanely gorgeous art style to blame for inspiring me to start actively posting about other artists on the blog. From that point on Retronator became less my personal portfolio/brainfart diary and more the journalistic-pixel-art-newspaper that it aspires to be today.
There you have it, the tip of the iceberg of 1,700 total posts from 10 years of Retronator.
Now excuse me while I go make some (pixel) cake for tomorrow.
Hello everyone, I am Matej Jan a.k.a. Retro. Welcome to Retronator—my blog and game development studio.
I started Retronator in 2007 with the goal of making video games focused on
creativity. Along the way I started writing about art and gaming, featuring artists and projects that
caught my attention. Nowadays this mostly includes pixel art, with occasional diversions into voxels,
low-poly 3D, low-res digital painting, and basically anything that makes me feel like a kid again
(text adventures, chiptune, LEGO …).
I'm also very nostalgic about 20th century games that didn't neglect their educational potential.
I expected titles like Sim Ant, Caesar II, and Sim City to continue into the future, expanding their
power to teach us something along the way. Games such as Kerbal Space Program and ECO continue to carry
the torch, but are far in between in the current gaming landscape. Expect Retronator to cover more
games like that in the future.
Finally, on these pages I document my own journey as an illustrator and game developer. I'm working
on an adventure game for learning how to draw called Pixel Art Academy. This newspaper lives
in the game world and I'll make that quite obvious soon. Thanks to backers of the game and supporters
on Patreon I can create this content full-time. Thank you for making this possible!
It's been 10 years since I started this journey and there is no doubt the next 10 will be
absolutely amazing. Stick around and I hope you will enjoy the ride.
Happy pixeling, —Retro
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