I write code, play games, and make some very amateur pixel art for fun.
Gaming stuff:
Just checking in to say:
Welp, for Halloween, I set a goal to do every #pixel_dailies for October. In order to not spend too much time doing it, I restricted myself to a 24x24 canvas and a single palette — slso8. Here it is!
Some of these I absolutely love, and some of them were phoned in, but I'm really happy that I managed to do every day and only end up one day behind.
Wow, I'm on a roll! Two things in one day!
I got my hair cut, and I was staring at the barber pole and thought it'd be fun!
I'm usually terrible at picking colors, but I really like the blue and red that I came up with!
After many months of not doing anything, I felt like doing some 1-bit art, and we recently went away on holiday and my kids absolutely loved the rays at Sea World, so here's a manta ray!
It's not perfect, and I felt like I could spend forever on the texturing, but I still love it!
I started doing this Cabin in the Woods last year to practice a top-down view building, but never finished it. Decided to finish it off today ☺️
I actually quite like it, but I wish I would've done bigger, larger, bolder trees, so that it felt more like the cabin was lost amongst the trees.
Just something quick and easy and cute this afternoon to grease the joints a little...
After some time off, and a new addiction in Call of Duty Warzone's DMZ mode, I'm ready to start doing pixel art things again!
Just some bored doodling — sipping coffee, scrolling through my phone, and doing some pixel art instead of working.
I kinda like how the coffee turned out in the end, and the phone is cute ☺️
Ok, so after being a little disappointed with the Michael Myers piece, I decided to do something else today, and I'm much happier!
I especially love the flow of the liquid in the potion!
I had a go at Michael Myers, but wow I'm just not super happy with it at all... I feel like it's almost there, but the proportions of the facial features are slightly out. I played with it a lot and still couldn't get it right.
Oh well! Here it is anyway. I'll move on now.
It's spooky season, and I'm back! I want to do a few Halloween things this month, so here's the first!
Hacker's hideout? Or a gamer's hideout? Could be either, really!
I like how the animations turned out for this one, especially the wall fan!
Today's Pixel Dailies theme: memory
I loved doing the animation for this. It turned out as cute as I'd hoped!
It's been a little while since I did anything new, so here's a battle axe with a Horizon Zero Dawn vibe:
I really like how the lashing on the handle turned out!
A little 1-bit Goomba!
Today's Pixel Dailies theme: bear
I love We Bare Bears ☺️
I used this as an opportunity to practice pixeling people/animals, since I've generally avoided doing that this entire time so far. I don't mind what I ended up with at all!
Today's Pixel Dailies theme: raven
I went for the Raven Software logo, because that felt like the right thing to do as a Call of Duty player 😂
Today's Pixel Dailies theme: surfboard
Limiting myself to a 96x96 canvas to stop myself from spending too much time on this... but a larger canvas to do more detailed surfboard designs would've been fun!
Last year I had two goals: do more pixel art, and make some simple games on simple, restrictive platforms. I really only did the pixel art bit, so this year we'll flip it and focus more on making games while toning down the pixel art a bit. Unless I get super inspired, I'll keep the pixel art to just Pixel Dailies themes, and instead spend time doing game dev.
I want to start with the Octo platform for CHIP-8 (and SCHIP and XO-CHIP) games, but I'm super interested in the Fennel programming language, which can target the LOVE2D framework, and the TIC-80 platform.
I'm also learning OpenGL this year, but not necessarily for game dev purposes...
It's nearly Halloween!
I wish I had more time to do some of the ideas I have in my head, but I still like how this turned out.
... and I love how this one turned out!
I'd heard about it before, but I came across TIC-80 again today, which is a fantasy console with a 240x136 display, 16 color palette, 4 sound channels, a bunch of sprites, and a bunch of background tiles, which supports the Fennel programming language, which is a Lisp that compiles to Lua.
Adding this to the list of potential platforms to do some dirt simple game development for.
I did another isometric Warzone building!
It wasn't as fun making this one, since most of it was redoing the same techniques as I did in the last piece. I probably won't do anymore Warzone buildings like this.
I did a common Call of Duty Warzone building in an isometric style, and I also animated it a little for the first time!
I used the Nyx8 palette for this.
I'm loving 1-bit style pixel art at the moment ☺️
I tried and retried so many variations of things, and this is what I ended up with. And I love how it turned out!
I play a lot of Call of Duty Warzone, and the Uzi from Modern Warfare was one of my favorite submachine guns that's never been particularly great compared to the other guns, but has always been a decent option. Because I liked it so much, here it is in a 1-bit style:
The aestheticly pleasing but not-so-practical build:
I'm enjoying the 1-bit style. I realised with this piece that my 1-bit pieces really need more resolution than I originally think they do, because any detail has to be achieved through lines and dithering instead of colors, and I've found having an extra pixel separation between line details and components (which was a tip I got from Brandon James Greer) to come out the cleanest.
Another quick holiday thing; the flashlight I've been using a lot on holiday for super early mornings, or late night motel check-ins.
I'm really pleased with how this turned out.
I'm currently away on holiday, but I've had some down time, so I took a couple of hours to do a seascape... because there aren't enough of these.
I like the reflections off the water.
I would've liked better detail on the lighthouse itself, and on the boat, but I felt like I was starting to overcomplicate things, and would've needed more resolution and a larger palette. I wanted this to be on the minimal side, rather than super detailed, given my lack of experience in anything super detailed.
I drew a Game Boy!
Wario Land was one of my favorite games on the Game Boy ☺️
I did my first bit of 1-bit pixel art, and the moon seemed as good as anything to try out. I love drawing the moon :)
Today I finished my Twitter banner and... I love it!
I love how the NES cartridge looks. I love how the 3.5" floppy disk looks. I love the dithering on the N64 cartridge. I love the Geodude on the 3DS, because Geodude's one of my favorites!
I'm super happy with how it turned out xD
Today I used the Crimson palette for today's Pixel Dailies word: Nocturnal!
If I'd had a lot more time, I would've gone with a higher resolution and to do a more detailed castle tower (or stone wall) that you could see more of. But the main thing I wanted was a giant crescent moon with a cat in the negative space :)
Okay, I still haven't solved the palette problem, but I changed the tree for a NES controller, which seems to work better at communicating that I'm a gaming person. A tree doesn't really do that.
I really like the profile picture I made, but the color palette looks terrible against Twitter and YouTube's white backgrounds. I need to find a new palette for it, but the one's I've tried so far don't work...
I used the Dreamscape8 palette to create a profile picture for Twitter and YouTube.
I realllllly like it, and I wanna use this palette again for more things :)
Next step is to create a large banner...
Today's Pixel Dailies lunch time project: a Katana!
I'm mostly happy with the detail on the hilt, although there's no detail or shading at the top part of it, closest to the blade. And I pictured having a faint rising sun in the background, but I couldn't figure out how to pull it off. Still figuring out this creativity thing...
EDIT: Bonus version of the Katana sticking out of the ground!
I like how the curve of the hilt turned out, and the grass looks cute. I tried to do long grass, but I couldn't make it work with this small a resolution.
I've been trying to do some more pixel art, but the project I decided on (a night sky with a fairly detailed moon) was way too big for me as a complete noob to pixel art. So now I'm trying to focus on really simple pieces of art I can do throughout the day, between work and life stuff.
I also finally found Lospec, which has amaaaaazing color palettes that I would never be able to come up with on my own.
So anyway, here's a mountain and some clouds. I used this to practice dithering, and... I actually like it.
This year I'm gonna focus on two things:
And because I'm super easily distracted, this list will probably completely change in 3 months.
My first piece of pixel art...
It's an open NES cartridge, specifically with a cartridge board from the TxROM family of cartridge boards, for which my handle is named. And I hate it.
I mean, I'm mostly happy with how it looks; the detail on the circuit board is what I wanted, and the resistors are my favorite bit, but I wanted to use this as a profile picture-type thing, and it just doesn't hit.