#cover3

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In the sea of tutorials called "How to draw X" where X can be very specific thing such as "gems" or "produce", it's nice to see the other end of the spectrum where you go as bold as explaining how to draw "anything".

What is great about Saultoons' tutorial How To Draw Anything... is that it highlights an important point: you don't need a specific tutorial to figure out how to draw something. If you know your basic elements of art (line, shape, form, space) and the fundamentals deriving from them (perspective, anatomy), you can indeed draw anything, especially with a reference to know the subject's 3D shape and materials.

(Also, don't get me wrong, Saint11 and Slynyrd have done plenty of tutorials explaining fundamentals and overarching concepts, so it took them a while before they came down to the nitty-gritty of individual subjects. Plus, it's nice to see how they apply their techniques to specific examples. It's nice to have the whole range covered.)

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Things are getting real! My game, Pixel Art Academy, designed for learning how to draw pixel art, now has a Steam page!

In particular, the version I'll release on Steam is called Pixel Art Academy: Learn Mode. It's a standalone, single-player artist simulator where you actually learn to draw! You'll go through interactive tutorials, complete challenges, and make art for different projects (mostly pixel art video games).

If this is the first time you've heard of Pixel Art Academy, it's a game I started working on 8 years ago with the idea of making a text/point-and-click adventure/RPG where you play as an art student. The kicker is that to improve your character's skills in-game, you gain them yourself in real life!

Even though I've been working hard on this project for many years, it's far from finished since it's very ambitious and I'm mostly working on it alone. There are some parts that are already polished and work well, in particular the learning core of the game. That's what I'll be releasing as Learn Mode. You'll skip all the character creation and go straight into pixel art, something many have been asking for (to just learn as fast as possible). Hopefully, it will become exactly that: the fastest, most fun way to learn drawing in the form of a video game.

If you like the idea, check out the new Steam Page. Wishlists are of course hugely appreciated!

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Norma2D (@norma2d​) has been one of my favorite artists to watch in 2020, so it’s fitting to end the year with a post of her wallpaper pack she released 2 days ago on itch.

It’s been a highly prolific year for Norma2D, further evolving her style of thinly hatched cluster transitions, a stylized dithering aesthetic I closely associate with her works. The atmospheric sci-fi setting further brings her works together, making this wallpaper pack a must-have.

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It’s a rare treat to get a new text adventure released all across 8-bit and 16-bit systems, especially one so beautifully illustrated. The Curse of Rabenstein comes with original graphics by Dylan Barry a.k.a. Dylan Burytheaded a.k.a. railslave (Amstrad CPC version) and converted to all other systems by the game’s main author Stefan Vogt (Amiga, Atari ST, DOS, ZX Spectrum/Next, Commodore 64/Plus/4). Yes, the team went true old-school and ported the game across main 80s/90s systems (at least the ones we had in Europe), adapting the art to each machine’s (often severe) limitations.

Chunky Amstrad CPC pixels on bottom (2:1 pixel aspect ratio), Amiga/ST/Dos conversion to squares above.

Gameplay itself is very enjoyable and I was able to get through it without hints in about an hour or two (just read the instructions to learn about the EXAMINE and SEARCH commands which carry you through most roadblocks). The atmosphere follows a colorfully moody medieval setting and progression towards the end will reward you with a spooky narrative and 20 beautiful location illustrations.

Commodore 64′s subdued palette lands an especially fitting version to the game’s graphics.

Physical releases of The Curse of Rabenstein are available from poly.play (around $30 for an actual box with many goodies inside, available per system) or you can get the digital versions from itch.io (pay what you want, even free). Time to fire up those emulators!

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I’m always happy when I can post some game art without UI elements, so here are backgrounds/locations from General Interactive’s Chinatown Detective Agency, drawn by Ricardo Juchem. 

I really like Ricardo’s story. He’s been a web designer for most of his career, but eventually got drawn into pixel art and started posting his first works in 2016, quite prolifically so in the #Pixel_Dailies community on Twitter (here is my archive of his works from that year). 

His dedication to studying art on a daily basis is seriously inspiring. By tackling on everything from digital painting to 3D, he assimilates general art knowledge and brings it back to pixel art. This way, Ricardo’s works quickly rose from simple vignettes to elaborate scenes, culminating in a career switch to pixel art in 2017. He got involved in multiple game development projects, first a cyberpunk point-and-click adventure Future Flashback, and as announced this year, Chinatown Detective Agency, which is inspired by the world-exploring series Carmen Sandiego.

Chinatown Detective Agency is one of the most popular games on IndieDB right now and is in the running for the annual Top 100 Indies of 2019 award. If you enjoy the project as much as I do, you can help the game by voting here (no registration required, just a click is needed).

As for Ricardo, I can’t wait how this 40-year-old will surprise and inspire us next. You can follow him on Tumblr @ricardojuchem.

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Video games have been around for half a century and we barely started exploring their more poetic, calm, thoughtful potential. The rise of walking simulators improved much in this regard, but I can’t recall (m)any done with the pixel art aesthetic, apart from shorter experiences like Jason Rohrer’s Passage or Octavi Navarro’s Midnight Scenes and The Librarian (please send me suggestions, I’m sure there must be more).

One more title to add to the list will be The longest road on Earth. Currently in development by a small team from Spain, the text-less narrative will give a glimpse into the life of four quite ordinary people. The focus will be on simply going about your day, enjoying the small things in life, experiencing the story through visuals and the soundtrack. It’s hard to guess exactly how the game will make us feel, but the combination of Mohammed ‘AtskaHeart’ Bakir’s black-and-white pixel art with Beícoli’s serene music/lyrics suggests a journey worth taking in any case.

The game is halfway through its crowdfunding campaign right now, so if you’d like to help bring a peaceful, unique experience to life, you can do that on Kickstarter.

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I wanted to share a few atmospheric story/promo artworks for Pecaminosa, a police action RPG in your typical noir setting. The illustrations are quite high-res, pretty much aliased paintings rather than your typical pixel art, but they complement nicely the more GTA-esque open world ambitions of the game.

In-game graphics are similarly more detailed and in a more serious tone than a bit more cartoony Pixel Noir (yes, there is a pixel art game in the same genre that’s literally included in Pecaminosa’s tagline) or colorful Tower 57. Audio side follows and instead of chiptuny bleeps or 90s MIDI synths we’ll get an original jazz soundtrack. The graphics engine unfortunately lacks dynamic lighting that would greatly add to that atmosphere, but the amount of various environments seen in the gameplay trailer impresses nontheless.

If all goes well we’ll see the Portugese indie team Cereal Games (working from the lovely Azores) release the game at end of this year. Before that happens though, you can sign up on IndieGoGo to be notified when the game’s funding campaign starts on March 4.

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I can barely afford to back Kickstarter games these days, but I’ve been waiting for Theropods since I first came across the Flash prototype 3 years ago. That version was developed in 2 weeks for the 2015 Adventure Jam and it was the cutest, short point-and-click thing with just situational puzzles instead of dialog trees. Fast forward till a couple of days ago when a campaign for a full fledged release finally launched on Kickstarter and I’ll be damned if I wouldn’t send some love their way.

The plot for the big release has been expanded with a yellow rock that falls from the sky and attracts bloodthirsty barbarians, as well as the arrival of a mysterious sci-fi traveler who has slim hopes of returning home. All of which of course—as the game name suggests—on a dinosaur-rich planet, making for an incredibly charming combination, if a bit unnecessarily tinted with the good vs evil language.

The lead pixel artist behind the game is Sarah Duffield-Harding a.k.a. @tinystuffz​​, with adventure-games specialist @mattfrith​​ on the backgrounds (I’m sure you remember my feature of his work from all the way back in 2014, right??). The awesomeness of the duo is self-explanatory from the screens above and even more so from the generously long game trailer:

Together with the campaign comes a new demo (windows only) that feels a bit more dark than the jam game, but offers just as good demonstration of how the dialog-free puzzles play out. The animation experience of the project creators (besides Sarah also Kostas Skiftas) really shines through as the villagers get themselves into entertaining situations, falling out of trees or climbing onto each others’ shoulders. It’s also really pleasing how you can instruct other characters to help you solve parts of the puzzles.

The team is planning for at least 2 more years of development and hopefully they can well surpass their 20k € goal so that they can afford to make full-time development possible. You can help in that endeavor yourself by visiting their Kickstarter campaign and reserving a copy (currently $14 early bird, later $17 or more).