Black Golem

Today I have started learning pixel art. First I googled for some tutorials about creating game sprites. There are plenty of tutorials available for this topic. Most of them point to Photoshop or Graphics Gale. Graphics Gale is available as free version and is a simple yet powerful tool for creating sprites.

After installing Graphics Gale I made my first try with a battle ship sprite:

It is just the rough outline of a battle ship but it shows the first lesson to learn: Keep the outlines thin, clean and closed.

The next test was for adding some details. The simplest details or a battle ship are the joints of the plates. I drew a new ship and added plate joints in red:

Click to enlarge

After creating these two sprites I recognized that scaling and rotation in the game destroy the appearance of the sprites and make them looking ugly. The thin 1 pixel lines become discontinued and lose their strength. This is an important point for all games which use this style of sprites: Think about scaling and rotation from the beginning.
My solution for different screen resolutions was simple scaling. That has to be reconsidered now. Inability of rotation is another problem which bloats the asset creation process. The sprites have to be drawn for facing multiple directions to avoid software rotation. I have to ponder about these problems.

Finally I tried colouring and shading a sprite:

That's it for now. I'm going to play around with different spriting techniques in the next few days. Firstly because I have to learn it from scratch and secondly because there may be a technique which allows rotation and scaling without to much quality loss while its quality/effort ratio is quite high. If you know such a technique for 2D sprites: Let me know!

Cheers,
Thomas