Pixel art for Video games

---- DOWNLOAD THE RESOURCES FOR REFERENCE ----
before we can confortably work in photoshop, lets take some time to learn the basic tools and some tricks to feel more at ease with photoshop it self. You'll learn how to create, duplicate and move layers. And also how to copy parts of a layer onto a new one, or onto itself.

Using Photoshop for pixel art is perfectly fine, but give that its a very complex software with loads of features, we want to make sure that our tools are set specifically to work with pixel level illustrations

Drawing a line isn't just a matter of creating pixels next to each other. there are optimal line directions and optimal placement of pixel, to suggest a specific shape. In pixel art, every single pixel counts.

With the fundamentals or line and shape drawing, its time to draw your first sprite: A Sword!
We will create a simple shape, and fill it in with simplistic and flat colors.

Use this photoshop file to practice tracing over a drawing. Use the layer above all the others, and with the pencil tool create a line as clean as you can, over what YOU think, are the most important features on the drawing.If you are not using photoshop, you can use the png version of the file that you can find in the resources.

Before we can shade in pixel art, we should look at some real life examples, and see how light affects different surfaces

In Pixel Art, everything is 2D. But how can we make objects look three-dimensional? We have to use shading. When we shade an object, we give it a sense of volume. there are a few rules to this. This lecture explains them by using primitive solids as an example.

After learning the most simple solids (Sphere and Cube) its time to have a go at another couple of simple volumes: A pyramid and a cylinder. These two new volumes follow the same rules, but have unique characteristics.

Outlines are one of the best ways to make objects stand out from the background. In this lecture we give a try to 3 types or outlining.

While still using the colors from the shading, we can add a layer of texture buy changing how we shade the volume. If instead of smooth shapes we take the care to add some variation to our transitions, we can suggest texture.

Shading gives and object volume, and an outline makes it stand out. But how do we make and object seem to belong in a scene? We need to light it with additional light. In this lecture I should the use of bounced light, so help place an object on the scene

With all that we learned about shading, we can now go back into our sword sprite and add even more detail what what we had previously, turning it into a fully shaded sword.

Please use the file attached and shade it to make it look like a gold chalice with encrusted rubies.

This lecture introduces the student to the themes and topics that will be discussed

Color Harmony is a way to make sure you make good decisions when selecting colors for strong, bold designs that stand out.

Colors can have an emotion charge, or a psychological meaning. This lecture explains the psychology behind some of the most popular color choices

When selecting colors, the color count restriction or overall tone of the scene should influence the palette. This lecture shows a way to create color palettes that actually fit together

Shading uses value, but color is also an important factor. This part 1 video is spent setting up scene for us to experiment with color and shading

After we've set the scene, now is the time to make some bold decisions in color, using what we learned

Materials not only have difference in shading, but also in the way they show color. In this lecture we will look at some classic examples

Tiles are by far the most used technique for filling the screen with a world. From Platformers to RPGs, tiles have always been widely used . This lecture serves as an introduction to the concept behind tiles.

With the concept sinking in, we can now go and make out base tile. This will be our main orientation, as it will provide size, style, color palette, volume and camera perspective.

With a bunch of things established, we can move a little more forward with the mockup, by adding a background. In this lecture I show a really quick and simple way to create a background scene that will serve as a backdrop for the mockup.

The game world will be made with all these tiles, so it would be nice to have some variation. Taking some of the lessons learned in previous lectures we add variation and depth to out mockup by adding variation in the tiles

Since the world right now is only made up with terrain, its time to add some additional elements for decoration and scale.

Its time to turn our attention to the background, and make sure that it also follows the rules of tiles.

Imagine your side scrolling game is set in a metropolis. see how little tiles you need to make a big building.

With out mockup now ready, we can start working on our character. There are a lot of considerations to take into account. We start by just creating the head, and with that we define the size, color, age, and sex of our character.

While the head provides with the identity of the character, the body provides with an attitude. Pose and shape will help convey a personality for out game character.

Once we are happy with a body shape, we need to make it as interesting, easy to read and as recognizable as possible. For this we use shading techniques to help give a sense of depth and scale

Now is the time to take our character from a mockup into a living thing. We do this with animation. Its no the most simple thing, but it is a key aspect of suggesting that the character is alive and ready for action

Running animation is one of the most important to learn and master. They convey weight, speed and agilty. But before you can do one on the go, we first should learn how to plot and plan a running animation.

With out animation planned out all we need now is to go in an fill the gaps. It takes time, but is so much faster once we have everything in place.

Idle and running so far were animations with continuous frame rate. Each frame was on the screen the same time as the others. In this attack animation we see how we can make a frame be faster or stay longer on the screen, to change the animation dynamics.

This exercise was designed to let you not only practice your character drawing skills, but also develop the capacity to interpret a concept design, and try and translate that into pixel art.

In this lecture you'll learn how to save one image with all your frames, and how you import that image into unity and configure it for use in a video game situation.

In this lecture we look into the animation panel in unity to rebuild our animations to work with unity.

Before creating terrain tiles, we need to understand what the "game camera" is meant to see and show to the player or user. So in this lecture we'll look at a 3d model and see how a topdown perspective is built.

Even though its hard to find names to call these different techniques of creating and using terrain tiles, I've created a selection of the four I feel are the most important and most used in pixel art.

Creating tiles can be intimidating if you think about the amount of variations you have to make. So we start with the most straigh forward one: Path Tiles. We'll create a fundation for all the tile pieces we need.

With the most basic pieces created, we now have enough material to create the next pieces with ease, by just reusing parts. We do this to create the base pattern for out tileset

Now that it's complete, lets take it for a spin, and see how it behaves. We'll build road using the tiles we created.

In this lecture, we'll look at how complicated the patch tiles pattern can be. We'll see how its used, and find a solution for a much simpler pattern that will do the same job

Before we do our patch tile set we want to create some base tiles for use later on. We start by making a standard grass tile

After we got a base grass tile laid down, we want to improve on its look so that it breaks the grid effect and looks like grass

With our base tiles created we can go ahead and start putting a pattern together so that we can build our tile set

Elevation is one of the main features of the block tile technique, so lets take advantage of that. Since we already have a grass texture and a dirt texture, all we need now is a cliff side texture to use as an elevation indicator.

With the cliff tile created, we need not to make transitions from the grass tile to the edges of the cliff side. One those are made we can more effectively suggest height.

To further increase the effect oh height the ideal is to add a shadow to the tile set. in this lecture we go about doing that and what tricks you can use to achieve that

With the small pattern complete, we can take the tileset for a spinn and see how it looks like.

With a grass tile and a cliff/dirt tile, it is fairly easy to create now a river pattern to add to the world.