It has been a long time since I did much in the way of pixel art. I think the last time I did it properly was while I was at university, and before that, in the early days of RPG maker I did some tiles.

Now I've probably worked way too much on it in the last month or two, having completed a few sprite sheets for my environments and props, as well as developed a name to ditribute them under. I have created a separate account to keep the assets portion of my game developemtn separate from the games themselves. This will allow me to distribute them under a different name and not clog up the Long Trail games account with art assets instead of games.

I've really enjoyed creating the pixel art so far, it's thereputic and a fun wind-down activity especially when I find myself with little spare time on most days. In conversations I've likend it to cross-stitch or crochet, though perhaps a little less practical in terms of how active you are while doing it.

I started out by looking at what styles I wanted to replicate. of course this was Zelda: A link to the Past, I am wearing my influence on my sleeve with this one. I based my grid sizes and designs off Zelda a lot here, using an 8x8 base with 16x16 tiles. this left me with a self-imposed rule, but I later learned that rules are often broken and as long as your ppi is maintained and the scale of your sprites stays the same then pixel art is far less restrictive than it first appears.

For example Link's character sprite doesn't fir in a 16x16 tile, or even a 16x32. the pixels for his sprite are within the scale, but he is actually something like 18x24. However if you break the mould with your tiles that will ruin the grid so those rule must be adhered to with the grid, but props and characters have free reign to be as large or small as they need to be within your style.

I looked at games such as Moonlighter for inspiration on my styles. I really love the colours and details in that game's artwork and while I don't consider myself anywhere near as talented as the artist for Moonlighter, I did what I could to replicate that games style and merge it with Zelda.

What I initially ended up with was just a bit too detailed for my liking. I had a flat green texture with a ton of variants with small specks of grass. My long grass was trying to be more Zelda than Moonlighter and ended up being pretty messy. You can see in the screenshot below the over-use of details in my grass sprites just felt too busy and I wanted to draw it back.

Given that the long grass was one of the first sprites I did I decided to go back and take lessions from what I'd already done and apply it to my grass sprites.

In Zelda the SNES has hardware limitations which restricts the number of colours which can be displayed on screen to 256, which is a lot but can quickly get out of hand if you're using lots of different shades of green for your grass. I won't have that same limitation so I decided that instead of using a defined outline for each individual blade of grass I'd lean more towards something more textured for my terrains.

I have taken this a little further than the above image, where I have added detailed variants to my tiles to break the monotony, which is something Moonlighter does with great effect. Zelda also uses flowers and grasses to break up the flat grass but is more limited in it's ability due to limitations of the hardware.


I'm quite happy with the result. It has been a long couple of months dipping in and out of pixel art and creating some sprite sheets. It is, of course, an even longer road ahead to create everything I need to create but I think I've made a good start. I have several firm tilesets, and I've probably made over 200 props at this point, all based on the mechanics I've designed or have intentions for. Creating pixel art has become something of an addiction, because as I make more I come up with further variants, different scenarios where more unique sprites might be required and furter details might be warranted.

As a little bonus below are some of the sprite sheets I've been working on for hte game and a preview of what will be published eventually on my secondary account in due time.

My sprite assets will be published under the name 'PixAdvent' a part of the LongTrailAssets account. follow there for more assets as they're published. The first asset pack is available as I dip my toes in the water: