Development Tools

To make Bad Pixels look and sound like it is from a computer of old, we had to use various specialist tools to make the assets. Here are some of the various tools and a brief description of how they are used:

For the vast majority of the graphics, we are using Crocotile3D. It's great bit of software to force the artist into thinking about polygons. Crocotile3D is all about retro graphics. Highly recommended.

Unity is a game engine capable of doing almost anything you program into it. We are writing a custom rendering pipeline to achieve the look here. We also chose this for its ability to publish on multiple platforms.

Shaders (https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/shader-writing.html)

A lot of what gives Bad Pixels it's look is a combination of graphical techniques and shaders. If you'd like to learn how to write your own shaders, follow the link above for more info. Graphical techniques are deeply part of the structure of how the game is put together and theres no easy "make retro" button. We'll do a blog post covering this in more detail one day.

To crunch down the graphics for certain sprites, Retrospecs is perfect. It supports many different computers of old, not just Commodore 64. Worth taking a look if you want to see your face as processed by a ZX Spectrum, for example.

For the music and sound effects we are using Deflemask's amazing SID tracker. This ensures we don't step too far away from our prime inspiration, the trusty old Breadbin (Commodore 64). 

The trusty "swiss-army penknife" of modern pixel-art, for Bad-Pixels we use it to clean up the animation Crocotile outputs into loops, and for many other tasks. Highly recommended.

That's right! We are also using a c64 for certain stuff. You may have heard a robotic voice in the game, this is generated with a program called SAM (Software Automatic Mouth)

Feel free to ask us any questions in the comments section. Thanks for reading!