A journey in pixels
Let’s go back, way back, to right before the turn of the millennium, shall we? I’m in highschool, and I’m learning QBasic, and I’m just sitting up late at night making little text adventure games. Sure, it wasn’t what was being taught in class, but I could figure out the logic pretty easily after a little while. And then I began to think…I wonder if QB could do graphical games, too?
My teacher didn’t have an answer, so I biked to the library and slid onto one of the computers and searched online for QBasic video games. Now, back in those nascent days of the triple w, searching for anything was crazy hard. You had to just kind of stumble around until you found it, no google, Yahoo was a list of hot links, and that was it. I went to Geocities, and decided to see if the had a QBasic neighborhood there (for you youngins, that was like an early version of Facebook or twitter, except you had to create your page by hand in HTML…and they were categorized in neighborhoods. So, the QBasic neighborhood had a bunch of interconnected sites about QB video games).
And what I found there was a treasure trove of information! Everyone was making my favorite style of game, it seemed, RPG. Done in the style of the NES RPG’s for the most part, since we were dealing with some serious memory limitations at the time in RAM. I learned all the lingo, how to make a tile engine, how to add smooth scrolling. How to BLOAD and BSAVE sprites, and how to xor then when you blit the sprites so it ignored a certain color like a green screen.
And I also started to learn pixel art around this time, too. It’s not like it is today, there was no burgeoning pixel art scene at the time. Just a handful of us game makers, kind of stumbling through.
Here was my first game’s art-
I was basically trying to make it look like one of my favorite NES RPG’s- Ultima Exodus. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was excited. I could make these images look almost sort of kind of look like the things they were supposed to be! I had a few other games here, including one in a higher resolution of 640x480 (before going back down to 320x200, and then 320x240), but those games are lost to time and a hard drive crash. I kind of wish I had a screen shot, at least.
From there, some pixel art tutorials by friends I knew in the QB RPG scene started cropping up, and I took them to heart. I studied some of my favorite SNES games, and then decided to remake my first game with my new improved skills.
I still have this game somewhere, but it crashes when you run it in Windows these days.
I was around 20 at the time now, and was in college. I was starting to think seriously about selling video games, the tricky part was how. No one really used credit cards online yet, this was before Paypal after all. People will still worried about having their information stolen, etc. Most of the shareware CD’s and markets had dried up by now, but I was certain I could maybe take checks, and have a website, or something. I’d gotten a CD burner with some of my college grant money, and so I figured I could take a check, burn a CD and put a label on it, and then send it out.
I graduated, and the tech bubble burst and I couldn’t really find work as a coder for awhile. That was a huge bummer. I tried selling games, but after that point people didn’t want to spend money on the internet at all, thinking that the bubble burst for a reason, and that everything had gotten out of hand. It was a huge bummer.
I made some GBA games around this time that I could use as a demo to shop around and get work coding for the GBA. It ran on hardware and everything, here’s some of the pixel art I did from around that time. I had kept up pixeling all the time, slowly improving through the years, and was getting really comfortable with the art form
That was a fun game, but it was hard finding work as a GBA coder, esp someone who couldn’t relocate just yet, since I didn’t want to interrupt my new family. I’d just gotten married, and my wife had gotten pregnant with our first child, a daughter. Bummed about the game coding thing not panning out, I decided to leave my coding to my dayjob, where I worked at a university, and decided to focus on writing for awhile.
That went well, and even though I was happy, I would still pick up my old games, and maybe doodle some art here and there, but not much. It was more like something that was a part of my past, and not who I was anymore, and I was kind of okay with that.
Until about 6 years ago, when I lost my one job. I then decided I was going to try video games yet again, a lot of people were doing well on Kickstarter, and I thought maybe I could try and do that. I wasn’t expecting a lot of money (not much back then), but enough to hire a musician and pay my artists would be swell. I didn’t do much pixel art for that one, I only did some clouds and some waves and that was all. I had hired a pixel artist to help me out.
But that didn’t pan out, either. My game coding skills were just not ready for that leap yet, I was rusty and out of work with making a game engine work, so I got another job and pushed that game aside as well. It never even made it to Kickstarter.
Fast forward about four years later when I get the itch to go in again. This time I’m messing around with this platformer idea, and I think I’m going to do it. I’m going to finish it, and I’m going to sell it.
This is when I really leveled up my pixel art skills. At the start of the same year, the art looked something like this
I mean, that’s pretty good, right? But then I kept pushing myself and pushing myself. I had shaken the rut off from that decade or so of not doing any pixel art what so ever, and I ended up here…like this
But, after a year of work and toiling away, when I sold it the response was something akin to a wet fart. It’s okay, I didn’t expect a lot, though it was far less than my greatest fear. I figured, it was my first game, of course it’s not going to do well. But it did sink my ego, and for a bit I thought to myself I would just do games as a hobby.
Fast forward a year later when I get this spark of inspiration to make a video game based on being a short story writer. I knew I could code it quick, it wouldn’t take a year to make this one, at the most probably two or three weeks. I decided to buy some stock art for the pixel tiles so I could speed up the process even more, but I still made the sprites myself. I really like the designs I did for Cleo and Emily and their cat, they make me smile every time I see them. But because of that, the game was compete in two weeks exactly, I decided to see if I could see if I could sell it for a little amount, and hope that I could maybe get a few bucks out of it.
It became a best seller, which surprised the hell out of me, and went onto to being ported to the Nintendo Switch. After that, I bought a graphics tablet to use during my next game, and damn. It really upped my game. I’ve been doing all the sprites and tiles myself for Monster Heart, and I just can’t believe how beautiful it all is.
Okay, it seems like I’m running out of space here! I have some more stuff to talk about next time, like how I pick my colors for my recent two games, and how I decide the style and form and how it’s all going to look.
Until then, happy gaming!