8px sprite obsession
Sep. 11th, 2011 09:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ordinalI have something to confess. I have become obsessed with making 8x8 pixel sprites.
It started when I began writing HTML5 games, concentrating on the Roguelike style, which requires sprites, really. (I did start off with character-based displays but did not find this very satisfying.) If I had not had Sprite Something for my iPad, I probably would have given up at this stage, but I do, so I didn't.
At first, 16px tiles and sprites were fine. I even flirted briefly with 32px ones, or such oddities as 24px isometric tiles. But gradually the size reduced. It is so much quicker to create an 8x8 pixel sprite, and also, in practice, more of a challenge - the colour of every pixel counts.
Of course, an 8px sprite is basically invisible on a modern computer screen, and to be visible, these images have to be enlarged to 32px or more. Here is the current state of my primary 8px character/monster tileset, enlarged to four times normal size:
All images full copyright - these are things I may use.
Tile 101 is me:
Quite a few of those are to be moved to other sheets. The system I have worked out allows for dynamic tilesets, anyway, which don't give away details of tiles the player hasn't seen, and this is not designed to be a generic fantasy game - the demons and elementals were for practice. But I have hundred more of the things - objects, map tiles, icons. Late at night, in bed, I take out my iPad and stylus and shift pixels about. It's worrying and probably, in practice, unproductive.
p.s.: I am aware of the "oryx" sprites, and they're very good work, but not quite what I'm looking for. In any case I would like to do things myself.
It started when I began writing HTML5 games, concentrating on the Roguelike style, which requires sprites, really. (I did start off with character-based displays but did not find this very satisfying.) If I had not had Sprite Something for my iPad, I probably would have given up at this stage, but I do, so I didn't.
At first, 16px tiles and sprites were fine. I even flirted briefly with 32px ones, or such oddities as 24px isometric tiles. But gradually the size reduced. It is so much quicker to create an 8x8 pixel sprite, and also, in practice, more of a challenge - the colour of every pixel counts.
Of course, an 8px sprite is basically invisible on a modern computer screen, and to be visible, these images have to be enlarged to 32px or more. Here is the current state of my primary 8px character/monster tileset, enlarged to four times normal size:
All images full copyright - these are things I may use.
Tile 101 is me:
Quite a few of those are to be moved to other sheets. The system I have worked out allows for dynamic tilesets, anyway, which don't give away details of tiles the player hasn't seen, and this is not designed to be a generic fantasy game - the demons and elementals were for practice. But I have hundred more of the things - objects, map tiles, icons. Late at night, in bed, I take out my iPad and stylus and shift pixels about. It's worrying and probably, in practice, unproductive.
p.s.: I am aware of the "oryx" sprites, and they're very good work, but not quite what I'm looking for. In any case I would like to do things myself.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-18 04:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-18 09:48 pm (UTC)