Pixel art - the last war of artriu

May 28

At Occulan Studios, we like to emphasize timeless themes, so for The Last War of Artriu, we started the design process with the super nintendo’s (SNES) internal resolution of 256x224 pixels in mind as a starting point. Pixel stretching was a major consideration back in the day — many crt televisions were at a 4:3 aspect ratio, which would mean for the project, something closer to a 299x224 pixels would be our working resolution going forward.

With this project, a major aesthetic choice was to create final on-screen art using the same constraints that developers from the mid 90’s had to deal with and to design around. While It is true that with Godot (our engine of choice,) You could design at whichever resolution you’d want, (and many modern retro-devs do to great effect,) for this project — we’ve decided that keeping it as close as possible to the SNES hardware is a fun technical and artistic challenge.

Fig 1. Here we can see some Iterations on playable party characters (note* thedesigns are still a work in progress.) As you can see, the style was based on a mix of Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, and other works from that era. We used Resprite (A pixel art creation program based on macOS ipad,) to create the designs, pixel by pixel — using cut and paste functions where needed.

From top left to right: Thesta Eir, Dah-li, Agran Yulib, Kress, Dexi. From bottom left to right: Balon, Thrakk, Vyeon, Dresda.

In most cases the painted/sketched concept art was the first to be designed — but in other cases, curiously — starting the design as a pixel art asset first was they way to go. It became apparent that both methods were useful in developing the assets and so as developement continue further