#title2

[retronator]

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.)

[touhou-memories]

Locked and unlocked extra stage option from Story of Eastern Wonderland.

[retronator]

Noah Cai, better known as Pixel Architect on YouTube, has been posting inspiring devlogs of Chef RPG to his channel for almost 4 years now. As a former architectural designer, he brings a specialized set of processes to his ever-improving pixel art skills.

Chef RPG is clearly inspired by Stardew Valley, expanding it with many activities such as hunting and cooking mini-games as you manage your very own restaurant in a quaint, seaside town.

We just received a new trailer for the game along with a September 12 release date (Early Access). You can wishlist the game on its Steam page.

[retronator]

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!

[retronator]

When Evil Licorice approached me to try out their new game Retro Gadgets, how could I refuse something that literally has my name in it!?!

It’s much like the fantasy console PICO-8 where you draw in a built-in sprite editor and write Lua code to make your own old-school-looking games. Except now you also get to design the hardware itself and choose your own specs! Want an egg-shaped tamagotchi? No problem. Remake your favorite calculator? You betcha. Use an LED matrix for playing a game of snake? In fact, I did all these when they commissioned me to create a few gadgets to show in their announcement trailer.

I love the skeuomorphic UI experience of it, tinkering at your workbench rendered in lovely pixel art. It’s just so cozy and if you put some vaporwave music to make retro gadgets to in the background, well, then you’d be living my life over the last few weekends and evenings, drawing dog sprites and trying to figure out the best way to calculate mathematical expressions in my WIP graphic calculator.

Unfortunately, you can’t get your hands on it just yet. The game’s demo will come out as part of Steam Next Fest on October 3rd so make sure to add it to your wishlist till then.

[retronator]

Kingdom. Two Crowns. Norse Lands.

Kingdom has for a long time been my favorite pixel art game series, ever since its debut as one of Raw Fury’s first two published games. I wrote about all that in The fall and rise of Kingdom for Retronator Magazine. Good old 2016!

After the amazing sequel New Lands, Kingdom Two Crowns—the third title in the side-view strategy/tower defense series—brought co-op multiplayer and extra biomes including Shogun and the later-released free DLC Dead Lands. Long-time fans were also delighted about the more difficult Challenge Islands intermezzo, and now it’s time for the 4th full campaign!

Kingdom Two Crowns: Norse Lands is the first paid expansion for Two Crowns and boy is it worth its money. I mean, did you see the screenshots above? The gameplay is as good as ever, but they’ve really outdone themselves in presentation. As if the always-reflecting river wasn’t at maximum eye candy already, I feel like the pixel art watercolor explorations by Franciszek 'Franek' Nowotniak (the environment artist on Norse Lands) really left a mark on the art style. The shading is done with big, chunky clusters so that the glorious background scenes combine with the forest hills and foreground trees into screenshot paintings worthy of being 5K wallpapers (which is exactly what I did for you here). The style is so consistent it’s sometimes almost at the detriment of gameplay as it took me some time to get better at noticing how many payable items a certain building has left. Not a problem for us Kingdom veterans however.

Not only does overachievement in presentation apply to the visuals, the soundtrack is also instrumental at making Norse Lands worthy of being a premium chapter. The music permeates the landscape wider than previously, delivered by the folklore-inspired band Kalandra. I don’t know how music can do that, but the four Norwegians make you feel the morning mist or the evening calm, as well as give you chills with atmospheric vocals and unexpected instruments. You’ll know when the blood moon is upon you more than ever before.

I'll stop selling the game now, I mainly just wanted to add the amazing art to the blog. Do download those wallpapers. And if you need a mystically-cozy (and at night scary) world to dive into, get the game on Steam ($7 for DLC, $9 for Two Crowns at 50% sale currently, macOS, Windows, Linux) or other devices.

[retronator]

I’ve had the joy of spending some time at the art studio of Christian Bazant-Hegemark in Vienna in 2018 and 2019 and got to know a game-developer-turned-fine-artist whose works fluently move between drawings, paintings, the computer generated, and back from digital to physical.

Stumbling down the freshly updated archive of his artistic journey, I wanted to highlight Pixelations, two series of pixel art works that bring Christian’s distinct voice to our medium.

Diary Works from 2020 (seen above) capture personal moments through his own lens. They are highly realistic, yet—through pixels and colors—stylized so that they put another level of nostalgia on top of the already rose-tinted glasses of remembering our past through moments frozen in time.

Political Works he started in 2017 are on the other hand pixel art interpretations of other photographers’ documentation of world events.

They make me remember RIOT: Civil Unrest, a simulation game that similarly used pixel art stylization to represent less joyful aspects of humankind. There’s something eerie in this juxtaposition, a welcome take that helps widen the expressiveness of our medium. To me it visualizes the cold 4th wall that separates my own life from the events happening elsewhere in the world. Can we really understand something we observe only through a (pixelated) computer screen?

Just like with other works by Christian, be it his large scale paintings or fragmented drawings, I can’t help but pause for a moment as his interpretations force me to explore complex emotions granted from a perspective different than my own.

To learn more about Christian, visit his website, and follow him on Facebook and Instagram.

[retronator]

Dwerve, the tower defense crawler RPG that I wrote about previously during its Kickstarter, just got a new trailer and a demo!

The fresh look into the game’s backstory of warsmiths comes from PAX West and is as smooth as ever (watch it above). Visitors of the convention are also welcomed to play the new Dwerve: Prologue, as are you (if you’re staying at home), since it’s available for free on Steam.

If this is your first look at Dwerve, it plays as an action RPG, except when battle time comes, you’re placing down turrets to do your bidding, smoothly transitioning the gameplay into tower defense. Give the demo a try and experience beautiful art from Pixel Pete, Enchae, and Sun Pixels while kicking some troll butt.