This week I’ve only been trying to get into the whole pixel art thing again since we decided that that would be the style for our game. I have some experience in making pixel art and sprites from way earlier although not much. Before we could really start making any assets we had to decide what size everything was gonna be so we could keep it consistent. After we discussed and planned the various sizes of different assets I could start working on my assets for the week. One of the assets I had to make was the running animation for one variant of our main character avatar you play as in our game. Because every game with a character needs a running animation. You wouldn’t want a character weirdly hovering to its objective in a t-pose.
So I set everything up in Photoshop to make it easier to both draw and animate pixel art. I enabled things like grid guidelines and used the timeline function as well for frame animation. I had a lot of trouble starting since I was still a bit rusty but started to get the hang of it more or less and then it started to go somewhat better. The main reason for it being difficult is the fact that the game is supposed to be top down 2.5D and I found it hard to draw a character properly from that view and then animate it nonetheless. But obviously I started with one frame and just tried to work from there. I put different body parts in different layers just to make it a bit easier when moving around stuff like legs and arms. The annoying thing about Photoshop when working with pixel art is that it’s really hard to move around things/transform them properly. You can’t simply rotate something for example because then it gets blurry and not right. This would have been very useful if it worked properly since everything needs to move a lot in different directions quite often when animating something. However it’s still fully managable to work without that kind of function of course. I’m thinking of using another software more focused on pixel art called ”Asesprite” in the future for the drawing part at least. I’ll probably still use Photoshop for animating since that’s still the program I have the most exprience working in for these kind of stuff.
In the end it turned out actually alright. I’m mostly happy with the running animation even though I can still see one or two things that could be fixed but those are just tiny details. This was, after all, my first sprite in a long while.
Concept art of the characters. The running animation I did
this week is for the right one.
Jari Melgén 
Hi Jari,
First of all the text is clean and easy to understand! Instead of mixing all sorts of information together, you have focused on your subject and given notes for your reasoning. It blends well together! Also showing pictures from your work gives me an inside of how you work in different styles (Always more fun to read books with pictures).
Obviously we have both worked in Photoshop and I can feel your struggle, just as me, working with animation in this loveable program. Your reasoning for changing animation-software is understandable and it’s swell that the text is more focused on the creation of putting art into motion, than your character design (as my last paragraph, it’s a nice focus). I mean, if you read a text about food you’ll unlikely find data about cars, right?
Due to your past experience of animating sprites I was at ease trusting your words and arguments, so it was both fun and educational at the same time.
Your concept art looks great and it will be a pleasure to see your sprite in 360 degrees, with cute design and colors easy on the eyes. The animation though. It’s so fluid that it reminds me of them good old times with my Super Nintendo in front of my parents’ TV; it just screams personality with crisp small details, like the mask shaking back and forth! Great job! Although next time it would be cool to have more insight in your animation itself. What animation are you looking for? What do you wanna tell the player? What is essential to build up your first sprite?
The blog post itself hardly needs improvment, but two small things, that is a paragraph or two could be added to lessen the feeling of a huge wall of text; maybe divide your art more throughout the text? Overall I like what you’ve written and animated and I can’t wait to see your game in motion; I bet it will look cool!
😀
GillaGilla