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Hello and welcome back to another Aseprite tutorial. In the previous tutorial we created a few new tile variants for our dungeon. In this one we will create some new tiles and animate them!

Drawing a Candle Tile

Open up your dungeon tilemap from the previous tutorial where we left off. Modify one of the brick tiles. Create a small alcove in the center of it and add a candle inside. Afterwards, feel free to place it around the dungeon.

Animating The Candle

To animate the candle, we need to create at least one more frame for it. Your Timeline Panel is actually directly integrated with the layer panel, however by default, there is only 1 frame. 

Creating a New Frame Slot

To create a new frame slot, by default you can press 'Alt + N' or right click the frame number and click New Frame or New Empty Frame. "New Frame" duplicates the original frame, "New Empty Frame" creates a new frame but does not duplicate the original frame. Since we probably don't want to manually redraw our entire dungeon all over again for the second frame, let's duplicate the original frame using "New Frame" specifically.

Drawing the 2nd Frame

Now that we have a 2nd frame slot, we can visually edit that 2nd frame of our animation. You can view and edit any frame's canvas by left clicking its frame number. While animating, you will constantly need to switch frame views to see the development of your animation. You use the arrow keys to do that or you can autoplay your animation in the preview window. The preview window has a playback button.

Changing the Frame Speed(s)

You may notice that your animation is too fast or too slow. You can modify any frame's speed by double clicking it or right clicking it and opening the frame properties. I think 200 milliseconds (ms) per frame for a 2-frame candle cycle looks ok.

If you need to modify frame speeds in bulk, you can select multiple frames by clicking inside of a frame number square and then drag across a range of them.

You can also modify your preview playback speed by right clicking the preview playback button. Generally, you can ignore Play Animation, but Play Preview Animation is for seeing your animation in action in just the preview window.

Resorting Frames

If you ever need to resort frames, select the frames first then drag from any of the edges.

Important Note

For animated tiles, you will need to use the "new tile" button specifically. 

This is because each frame of an animated tile must be a new tile. If you attempt to edit frame #2 of the candle tile but don't create a new tile, then you'll replace the 1st frame with the 2nd frame. You will also need to place these new tile frames again manually within the dungeon as far as I know.

Flame Movement

The flame of the candle should rise and fizzle out or have some natural subtle movement. It can have a slight pulsing light radius. We have options. Here's a first pass with a 2-frame cycle at 200 ms/frame, which is alright but I think could be improved with more frames.

I believe this is a better pass with a 4-frame cycle, although could be sped up.

Here is the sped up version at 100 ms/frame.

Spike Trap

We can also have spike traps, though 4 frames for it would be too little. Let's try 8 frames. You can select all of the original frames 4 frames simultaneously, then if you hold down 'Ctrl' or 'Alt' and drag that selection to the left or right, it will duplicate the set of frames! This gives us a decent loop delay for the spike animation because we don't need spikes coming in and out every 4 frames, without altering the candle animation.

Marquee Selection Tools

I guess now would be a good time to briefly introduce you to the marquee selection tools, but not the time to go over all of them in depth yet. it can be convenient for creating our spike trap tile.

Each of them lets you select groups of pixels or tiles in your canvas. This can be convenient while drawing when you need to duplicate/ transform/rotate/flip/move/recolor them etc. For example, with the rectangle marquee tool allows me to select a single "spike hole" by left click dragging across one of them, corner to corner, then copy/paste that selection around 4 times to achieve 4 holes on the spike trap tile. To move the contents of a marquee selection, have any marquee tool active, then left click drag the inside (not the edges) to a new location on the canvas. Deselect when you're done to lock it in place.

This gives us a better and faster start, rather than manually and slowly drawing each of them with the pencil tool.

Pay attention to the settings near the menu bar. Generally I never mess with these, but I keep "replace selection" on.

Also for tiles, there is a preference setting for marquee selecting tiles with double click.

Spike Trap Animation

I actually had to make the holes slightly bigger so the spikes can be sharp rather than flat-topped, but here is a sprite sheet for the spike trap. Frames 2 and 4 are identical.

and here is the result:

Notice that delayed intervals I mentioned on the spike trap activation. It's actually just the same 5 frames without the spikes times. In theory, if you had the spike trap on its own layer, you could use the "frame link" feature to achieve this. You can select multiple of the white circles  (cels) underneath the frame numbers by drag selecting them, then right click and select Link Cels. This would make all of the frames with linked cels display the same image.

Although I'm not actually going to do this, because our spike trap is NOT on a separate layer; it is shared with the candle layer so this would cause a delay in the candle animation and we don't that.

That's enough talk for this post. I'll see you in the next post when I find the time.

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Hello and welcome back to another Aseprite tutorial. In the previous tutorial we created a brick tile which looped seamlessly. In this tutorial, we will create a floor tile and a door tile which we can place into our dungeon.

Open the Brick Tile Aseprite File

First thing is first, make sure you have your brick file open in Aseprite.

Turn off Tiled Mode

The "Tiled Mode" feature we used originally is nice for seeing just one tile loop seamlessly, however the disadvantage is that it is restricted to only one tile type. If we want a whole dungeon scene, we will need more tiles to work with. For this tutorial, turn off Tiled Mode completely.

Enlarge the Canvas 

Enlarge the canvas size using Sprite - Canvas Size specifically, not "Sprite Size". This way we won't stretch the brick tile. The resize prompt can calculate math automatically. This is convenient because we want our enlarged canvas to be a multiple of 16 in both width and height (otherwise we'll have a cropped tile grid which will be harder to work with). For example if you type in 16*15 (* is the multiplication operator) the output is 240. We can use 240 pixels for the width and height. Anchor the brick tile to the top left using the arrow icons in the window prompt and click OK.

The Result

The resulting canvas should look something like this, using your secondary brush color (the toggle color) as the background.

Changing a Few Things

In your file explorer, you should rename the file to "dungeon tilemap.aseprite" or something similar, because we're creating a dungeon tile map, not just a single brick tile anymore. Select the background layer and fill it with black. Rename the "brick tile" layer to "dungeon tilemap", then convert it to a tile map layer with a 16x16 grid. Ignore the other options.

After you have done that, you officially have a tilemap layer!

Tilemap Panel and Buttons

With the tilemap layer selected, there is this button on the far left of the Tilemap Panel. If you click it, it will show the tiles available to place around on that specific layer. Currently we just have a single brick tile so that's all that will appear, as well as a "checkerboard" tile which actually just represents no tile or tile eraser. In other words it's "null".

Placing Tiles Around

While this button is active, you can click any tile in the panel there then place them around in the canvas with the pencil tool. Also you can use the eyedropper to set any tile that are already placed on your canvas as your active tile-brush. If you want to delete tiles, use the eraser tool.

Creating a New Tile Type

We will create a new tile variant, which is going to be a dungeon floor tile. To create a new tile type, you must select this button:

While this button is active, you can draw into any tile grid square to create a new tile. You should turn your grid visibility on for this. Here I just reuse existing colors from the bricks to create a simple floor tile.

Now that we have a new floor tile, if we click the tileset button again it will be present.

Modifying Existing Tiles

If you only want to edit the appearance of existing tiles without creating new tiles, select this button:

Similar to the previous tutorial, while this button is active and you edit any pixels on a single tile, all of the matching tiles will simultaneously get the updates as well.

Creating a Door Tile

Let's have fun with the Symmetry Options to create an arched dungeon doorway before we close this tutorial. In "View", there are symmetry options which you can turn on or off. Turn it on.

You will see the options presented near the top of Aseprite. Turn on Horizontal Symmetry since the left and right halves of the door will be identical but mirrored.

Then you will see a symmetry line... that matches your grid color, which can be slightly inconvenient at times because it can be hard to distinguish it against your grid lines, but it's not a big deal because you can either turn off the grid or find the 2 white endpoints. Mine is the blue line at the far left.

Placing the Symmetry Line

We will actually need the grid however, because we need to know the tile space we have to draw this door. We need to drag the symmetry line to the center of a brick wall tile. You can drag the endpoints. Because I've notice the blue grid/symmetry lines clashing with my tileset colors, I've decided to set the lines to green (grid color option found in Edit - Preferences - Grid)

Since we are creating a new tile, select that "new tile" button I mentioned earlier. We will edit a single brick tile, but we don't want all of them to change. Since the door will mostly be a large dark hole, if you need to change your brush size quickly, you can set a shortcut for it. It is listed as a mouse wheel shortcut. I set 'Alt + Mouse Wheel' for this. 

Here I draw an arched door with red monster eyes (just spontaneously), it's also got a bit of a bizarre mixed perspective on the side bricks, but I'd say it passes the sprite test.

Final Result

 I've decided to go with an extra door tile; one with eyes and one without just for some variation.

In the next tutorial we'll probably go over animated tiles such as torches, flames, spikes, maybe even these monster eyes blinking in the door way. We can also have rivers of water, lava, or acid inside the dungeon, so be excited about that hopefully in the near future.

Anyway thanks for reading!

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Hello and welcome back to another Aseprite tutorial. In the previous tutorial I went over the basics of the Aseprite interface, creating some shortcuts and options if necessary, but in this tutorial we're going to draw our first sprite! You will learn some tools as well as how to tile bricks onto a tilemap (we may even create a full dungeon tileset at some point). Let's start by drawing a seamless brick tile.

Create a 16x16 Canvas

Let's start by creating a small canvas just to focus on exactly one tile for now, but we will have it auto-tile shortly. Set the new canvas to 16x16 pixels and RGBA. Put any background option.

Set Up Preview Window

Open your preview window and set it about this big (not very big) in the bottom right corner of Aseprite. This will allow you to see your work in progress without the camera constantly moving as you work.

Pan and Zoom Controls

In the future, there will be much camera panning and zooming as we're drawing, so we need to know how to do that.  At the right of my Aseprite window is the toolbox and these are the Hand Tool and Zoom Tool. 

Left click any tool to select it. You can see whatever tool is currently active by seeing a slightly brighter background behind the icon. For example, the Hand Tool here is active rather than the Eyedropper Tool.

With the Hand Tool, you can pan the camera horizontally or vertically by left click dragging the canvas. With the Zoom tool, you can zoom in or out of the canvas; left click zooms in, right click zooms out. 

However you'll eventually realize that's tedious. It's better to set up shortcuts for these. I have Hand Tool (quick) set to 'Ctrl' so whenever I hold down Ctrl, I can left click drag to pan the camera. Also I think as a constant default setting, you can hold the middle mouse button and drag to pan the camera as well.

I actually never use the Zoom Tool, however do zoom in and out very often. I have the mouse wheel's default action for zooming, which is also found in the Keyboard Shortcuts. For whatever reason if your mouse wheel shortcut key is empty or glitched, just click "add" and apply a blank set of options there and it should return to "Default Action"

Panning and Zooming the Preview Window

The panning and zooming controls for the preview window are identical, except you can't change them. It's always going to be left click drag to pan and mouse wheel to zoom.

Layer Panel

At the bottom of Aseprite is our Layer panel. We currently have just one layer, either a background layer or normal layer. There is a an eye, a lock, and dot icons displayed near the layer. They serve different purposes:

Eye - Toggle the layer's visibility on the canvas.
Lock -  Allow/Restrict drawing on the layer.
Dots - Link/Unify frames (will be discussed in an animation tutorial in the future).

I'm not concerned with the background for now since we will entirely draw a square tile right in front of it.

Creating a Brick Layer

If you haven't modified the shortcut, creating a new layer can be done with 'Shift + N' or you can right click the background layer and select New - New Layer. Rename the new layer to "Brick Tile".

Grid and Auto-Tile Feature 

In the menu bar select View. Under View, there are 3 features listed: Grid, Show, and Tiled Mode. 

First select Tiled Mode - Tiled in Both Axes.

Set Grid Settings to 16x16 pixels. 

Set Show-Grid.

You will then see a 3x3 tile grid.

Now as we edit any of these squares, all of these squares will update identically! 

Drawing the Brick Tile

To start, we can fill the whole brick layer with a simple color desaturated blue color. First, we need to select all of our original canvas (which is only the center tile, before we turned on Tiled Mode). You can set a shortcut for "select all", but by default I think it's either 'A' or 'Ctrl + A'. After that, congrats, you've just made your first marquee selection.  It appears as animated dotted lines around your selection.

Now, you can fill a color in that center tile space, which in turn will fill all the tiles! But we must first select a color. 

Color Picking

In the bottom left of Aseprite is the Color Picker. I call them some things here and they're not official names of these things, but it's a convenient way to remember them. I listed: Free Picker, Hue, Alpha, Active Brush Color, and Toggle Color.

Free Picker - I call it "free" because you get to slide the color cursor both horizontally and vertically, though Hue and Alpha values are listed seperately.

Hue - Think of it as a simple color choice (i.e. red, green, blue, yellow), but no lightness/darkness or transparency values attached to it.

Alpha - How opaque the color is. The color could be completely invisible, half visible, fully visible, etc.

Active Brush Color - The color displayed in the rectangular box is the one currently selected and will be used for drawing, filling, etc.

Toggle Color - An alternative brush color that is inactive, but can be selected with 'X' or whatever keybind is assigned. This also swaps your Active Brush Color in its place.

Color Sliders

You can click your active brush color to pop up some colors sliders, useful for more precision. You can slide the arrows to achieve the exact number values you want. You can also type them in directly. 

There are many letters associated with the color sliders and I'll define them below:

R - Red
G - Green
B - Blue
H - Hue
S - Saturation
V - Value
L - Lightness
A - Alpha
# - Color ID

Note: One thing that's a bit tedious is that by default the slider window auto-closes if you move your mouse away. To prevent this, drag the window out and away from its original location, though you can place it back afterwards. For example, arrange it like this:

My favorite sliders and my way of picking colors is nearly always the HSV sliders. I use this to achieve Hue Shifting which is a popular topic that I'll introduce for the brick tile.

Filling the Brick Tile Midtone

Ok, select a slightly bluish gray color such as the one I have selected. It will serve as the midtone for the brick tile. Then select Fill from Edit or use the shortcut. You should see a result like this.

You can deselect the marquee selection now, which is also found in "Select".

Drawing with the Pencil 

I will explain hue shifting shortly, by for now let's keep things simple and create some dark brick lines. Slide the value of the current color down, but keep every other slider amount the same. Select the pencil tool. While the pencil is selected, you can access the settings near the menu bar. There are different brush shape options there that you can mess around with. There is the brush size which we'll just set to 1px. The Ink is a bit more confusing but just select Copy Alpha + Color. Completely ignore "Dynamics". Pixel Perfect determines if your lines will appear as jaggy staircase lines or simple lines.

With the pencil tool, you can "free draw" with left click, or even draw straight lines! To draw straight lines, you must first click a start point on your canvas, then hold 'Shift' and click an end point. You can also hold 'Ctrl' to snap the angle of the lines to ~30 degree increments. Draw some brick lines like this until you get a nice seamless pattern. 

Now go brighter, slide the brush color value greater than the original brick color we added. This will be our highlight color for our bricks. Add some highlights to the top of the bricks.

Eyedropper Tool  

Now that we have a few nice colors on our canvas to work with, you can reselect them with the Eyedropper Tool.

With it selected, you can left click any color on your canvas to reselect it as your active brush color, though you may have to modify the its settings found near the menu bar.

However as mentioned in the previous tutorial post, you can set right click as a shortcut for this exact feature so you never have to select the eyedropper tool manually. This option is found in Preferences from Edit.

Hue-Shifting

Now lets apply some hue shifting to our tile sprite. The general 1st rule for hue shifting is that highlights should appear warmer in color (i.e yellow or orange) and the shadows should appear colder/cooler (i.e. blue or purple). The 2nd rule is that warmer colors become less saturated and cooler colors become more saturated.

Replacing Colors  

In "Edit", there is a feature to replace colors on your canvas. You must eyedrop the color first. Then you can modify the original color (From) to the new color (To). Tolerance determines if similar colors to the color in "From" will also be replaced, but generally it's best to keep it at 0. Make sure "Preview" is check-boxed to see the replacement in real-time. 

Now I have updated all the colors of the brick tile.

This new tile pops, compared to before. The colors are much stronger and contrasting along with the subtle hue shift. Without hue shifting, it's very common for sprites to look desaturated and basic. 

Polish

The final stage of spriting anything is the Polish stage; basically just making things look good and ready to publish. We can give our brick tile more texture, reusing our existing color with the eyedropper function or even adding more colors if you wish. I want to do that and show the true power of hueshifting before we close this tutorial.

I usually create a new "polish" layer over my original layer to make these edits, then merge them down after I'm done. The background layer can basically be ignored for now, or even deleted because it's irrelevant at the moment.

Here I basically add more roughness and cracks to the bricks, using more colors and hue shifting techniques.

That's it for the brick tile for now, but we will discuss more dungeon tile-mapping and in the next tutorial. Thanks for reading!

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Thank you. I'm actually planning on going back and revising some of these tutorials soon and also making them more sequential because I realize I skip ahead sometimes so they are confusing occasionally.

Hey. I'm possibly interested, but how many map designs do you need ? Are you paying $100-200 USD each? Do you process transactions with Zelle or Paypal? I haven't used Tiled in many years but I'm willing to re-download it again and learn the software. It could be something I work on in between work for my other freelance clients. I'm an Aseprite pixel artist and here's my portfolio (even though it sounds like you don't need me drawing new assets currently). Aseprite has a tilemap feature, but I'm sure Tiled is a bit different (possibly better) regarding the tilemapping process. I'm also learning low poly software like Blockbench and Crocotile3D, so overall I'm interested in learning new software and branching my game dev art skills.

Contact Info:
Discord (preferred): imonk#8030
Gmail: kevinanderson32155@gmail.com

Hey thanks for the job recommendation Asensio. I do want to try working on the art for the characters and backgrounds. I've just never drawn in LucasArts style before but I think some style study and communication could solve it! If you want talk on Discord, my username there is imonk#8030.

Hello. I'm looking for pixel art projects/games to work on. I have 2 clients currently, but I'm trying to take just one more at the moment. I generally charge per tasks and just keep track of everything on Notepad, such as tasks, agreements, and receipts. I accept payments through Zelle or PayPal. I do a little bit of everything including characters, animations, backgrounds, or UI. Here's a reel of my portfolio on Cara from 2025.

You can see my most recent pixel art on my Cara page. 

Contact Info:
Discord: imonk#8030
Gmail: kevinanderson32155@gmail.com.

Thanks for reading and let me know if any jobs come up!

Hey. Here's my portfolio.  I was thinking I could do all of the portrait frames for a total or $200-300 USD. My discord name is imonk#8030.

Hello. Did you find anyone to work with yet? Here's my portfolio.  I have played Dungeons of Dreadrock 1 & 2 and was actually trying to make a dungeon puzzle game based on that genre, so I have a tileset if you're curious what that looks like. This stuff never got finished unfortunately, but I might get back to it at some point.

Game Clip 1

Game Clip 2

Thank you! I should try an airship goblin I think.

Hello game developers and artists! Occasionally I like to talk about art tips, but I feel like I don't talk about the very basics enough! In this blog post, I want to briefly talk about the benefits of practicing line sketches stage before jumping straight into shading and coloring. If you're a beginner, then this is the simplest as pixel art gets so you might want to consider this. It's a great way to just practice shapes, proportions, and perspective first before you move on to more advanced things such as shading/specularity, coloring/hue-shifting, small details, fancy tricks such as anti-aliasing, or fancy outlines with subtle colors instead of full black. You may want to avoid all that extra stuff and focus on the basics first and start small. Besides, you can also always add additional layers over your line sketch or create frames to include those things later. And one of the key things benefits is that these sketches or line art  can be done anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour, depending on your speed as well as how much detail you plan to include. 

I've done a few examples for some DOOM sprites. The sketch on the far right isn't officially from Doom, but it's a cybernetic take of the Cacodemon or Pain Elemental. The larger sprites here are about 100x100 pixels.

I also have these various line sketches of enemy designs from the Final Fantasy JRPG series and each of these sprites fit within a grid of 32x32 pixels.

If you want ideas to draw, I'd say pick things you're a fan of and just find some things to draw. Search up screenshots of things from your favorite games or something you enjoy. Go on Wikis or print some screenshots from YouTube maybe (you can press "PrtSc" on your keyboard or Shift + Window + S to crop a section of your screen and paste it somewhere, or just open up "Snip & Sketch" and use the app). Try to do whatever you have to do to find stuff to draw I guess.

But as you can see, all these sprites are just 2 colors, which means you aren't spending so much time constantly thinking and carefully picking many colors with color sliders. Instead you just pick 2 colors and use the eye dropper tool or set up a keyboard shortcut in your pixel art software to swap between the two colors. 

These things are subtle, but you also don't have to think about think about:

- Hue-Shifting
- Specularity (for shiny, wet, or other reflective materials),
- Subtle techniques such as anti-aliasing (to create a smoother or blurry look  for small details and borders) or creative outlines. 

Overall, just limiting yourself to 2 colors is a great way to get an intro to pixel art. 

When I find more time, I want to talk about adding one more color (or possibly 2) to shade these sprites.

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Why not draw for social media? It sounds counter-intuitive, but there's more to it I promise. 

Posting art on social media and appreciating the engagement that comes your way is great, The ability to get discovered by clients willing to pay you for your art is also great.  I also think a little bit of social media can actually reduce loneliness! I know, crazy! But the reason I'd advise not drawing purely for social media  is because it probably is making it less fun and probably even objectively less healthy for you in many ways.

The Endless Demands

The more you focus on social media, the more likely you're going to focus on external validation. Stress becomes involved with every drawing. They always need to come out perfect, cool, exciting, beautiful, impressive, hot, etc. There are many things you could draw that are great art practice but you'll never make time for them if you make art always about the numbers. 

It's Literally Unhealthy

I've also noticed that many artists feel the urgency to post a drawing daily to please the social media algorithms. This often means sacrificing physical and mental well-being. Not just by skipping exercise and sleep, not just by straining their eyes for hours (social media scrolling + digital art), not just by living purely indoors, isolated, sedentary, with poor posture fatigue, but also chugging energy drinks or coffee to compete with the many other artists who do the same.

Part of me feels bad because these are harsh realities that I can't sugar coat. If you want it to be your career or you need that external validation, then you have to accept that you must face these problems head-on, and they're probably not the same reasons you originally became an artist to begin with and so you wonder why you no longer enjoy drawing. It probably just slowly snuck up on you as the world has slowly evolved.

There's Still Joy To Be Had

It shouldn't be a huge surprise why so many artists on social media so frequently post about having creative block or being burnt out. It's brutal, but with that said, I think reducing your reliance on social media as an artist can significantly improve your physical and mental well-being. 

Benefits Of Reducing Social Media Usage

1) If you're scrolling less, that's less time you're seeing rage bait, arguing with strangers, seeing thirst traps, bad news, cute animals (yes I post cute animals too, sorry) or even just positive or neutral posts that don't serve you. The stress and anxiety is abandoned because the most of the posts you see on social media is probably mostly irrelevant to your own personal life.  

2) The less you rely on social media, the less you're going to make your daily decision to draw depend on it. It will no longer be about "what will perform well".  It becomes about personal growth. You'll be okay with drawing just for sake of practice, without the pressure to make something great. 

3) You'll have more time to exercise and not be in front of digital screens frying your eyes all the time. I know it doesn't sound that beneficial but I found that going on walks, even just around my same old boring neighborhood for the 1000th time really just keeps me physically and mentally healthier and ready to draw when I come back to the house.

So these are key reasons why I advise other artists to just try it out. Being an artist is always hard, but at least I do feel much more joy from daily drawing than I did a few years ago when I was very addicted to social media. It takes time to get used to a life with less social media, but I think it's worth it to see how reducing social media can improve your art journey.

I still have to get through completing this game, but I like the turned based RPG gameplay!

Can you read my "looking for work" post please? It's got my portfolio and I ask for $20/hr, but here are some highlights from my portfolio. 

I technically have "Dark Souls" mockups too 😅 but since that's not what you want I'm just not going to showcase it.

I've made a post about looking for work just yesterday. Can you please read it? All the information is there. My portfolio, my contact info, etc. My rate is $20 per hour. I also think 48x48 pixels is the sweet spot for sprites for being detailed enough but not too much expensive work. 

Please read this.

These are some of my highlights.

Hello. I'm looking for pixel art projects/games to work on. My rate is $20 per hour for any pixel art related tasks but we can negotiate if needed. My main expertise is character animations and most animations I do get done in 5-10 work hours if the characters are within 64x64 pixel dimensions (examples are in my portfolio), but I do a little bit of everything including backgrounds or UI. Here's a quick reel of my portfolio on Cara from 3 months ago.

If you want to stay up to date with my pixel art journey, visit my Cara page. I've made some fan mockups of Gauntlet, Dark Souls, and Maximo since and sadly they're not showcased in this YouTube video! The YouTube video is slightly outdated.

ALSO important: If you can't afford my rate, I'm still trying to stay busy in the game dev community and gain more experience with actual games however I can, so I'm trying to get more involved with shorter projects that take roughly 1 or 2 weeks such as jams. I really want to be able to just say I've worked on some games!

If you have something to reply, reply here or you can contact me on Discord at imonk#8030 or Gmail at kevinanderson32155@gmail.com. 

Thanks for reading!

Here's my portfolio. Although I'm not necessarily good with Tiled and haven't used it in years. I can learn Tiled if that's what you need. I'm currently in a game jam until the end of the month so I can't start yet but my discord handle is imonk#8030.

I wonder what other levels you had planned. Very Gauntlet-y!

I made some little dungeon doodle, but technically we're not committed to anything yet. Still open for an audio/music designer.

Yeah I know. When the game speaks or sometimes even says "buy me" or something like that.

Sure, I'll add you on discord.

Hey thanks! Yeah I think it's about time to start using my art to actually make games 😅. I never deeply got invested in game jams yet, but maybe now's the time to try.

Yeah I was kind of thinking that general idea where the player has to be in designated areas to do it, but we could also try mana potions to resupply that stuff. I haven't fully thought out the mana potions, but fetching them for the mage just sounds fun. Also maybe the mage can shoot transformation spells at the player, we'd have to be careful with this idea here though because that's technically making the gameplay easier unless we design some difficult levels around that idea.

MAYBE we don't even need a mage. Maybe we just collect mana potions and that's how we can transform. The player would just have to use/count them wisely, or reset level.

Is that already a taken title? Ah man. Well yes that's the idea.  Key thing is probably going to be that the creature transformations CAN'T happen all the time, otherwise it's like what's the point? That's basically just an OP character with every ability, so I think we'd have to limit that somehow... possibly only allowing it to happen by contacting a mage who has limited mana, or transform pads/objects. It could be that the main player moves with WASD controls and the mage moves with arrow keys.

EDIT: You know what? I'm buying that.

If you ever want to try game jams with a pixel artist, let me know.

Well here's mine. https://cara.app/imonk

I generally go by $30/hour because I usually can't predict how long the work will take.

Yeah doing indie stuff is exhausting 😅. No extra pressure though. You do you.

I'm a pixel artist. I'm specifically trying to make a zelda-like with mainly 16x16 resolution sprites. Key gameplay would be exploration and puzzles. 

I have a vague idea (just if we need an idea) but it's not necessary. The player gets 4 creature "curses" and turned into creatures, which basically translates to having 4 creature abilities total, but the player uses these abilities to progress through... maybe like 4 main levels, and 1 overworld. The player returns to human form by the end of the game.

Anyway portfolio drop!

So did you ever get that team? I'm a pixel artist if that's what you need.

Hey aren't you that speed spriter? I think I remember you from like 5 years ago! Great stuff!

Are you into zelda-likes or puzzles? I was looking to do a 1-2 week pixel art game in that genre and I specialize in pixel art.

My portfolio

I want to make a short game similar to this. 

Currently I'm thinking about a game where you get turned into various monsters and it's technically not what the protagonist wants, but in terms of gameplay the monster abilities are useful to progress.

I have no idea if the game will succeed but could be worth a try.

I played a free game last night, felt revived. Simple art, controls, gameplay, but genuinely a polished puzzle zelda-like. Although this game is bigger than a game jam, it feels like it has a lot of the game jammy design I'd like to do art for someday if people want to pair up.

Screenshots:

Game link: https://ansimuz.itch.io/a-meta-data-game

My art portfolio: https://cara.app/imonk

Currently I'm thinking about a game where you get turned into various monsters and it's technically not what the protagonist wants, but in terms of gameplay the monster abilities are useful to progress. It could be worth a try.

I miss these simple but calculated kind of games.

Hey Quillan86. If you need pixel art, I do a whole lot of that, and it's the only art medium I do for the most part (not standard digital art like Photoshop), but pixel art is what I specialize in. I just I haven't worked with other developers very often, or sci-fi topics. Currently I think I would charge an hourly rate of $30/hour. Charging per asset can be harder because the amount of time and work can be unpredictable and vary. Typically I like to start things in grayscale and then do a quick color overlay paint on a new layer when doing preview art, but with that said, here's my portfolio. I do mockups, UI, animations, things like that. If you like my work, give me a reply and then we can switch to discord or something. https://cara.app/imonk

Hey Kully. I've been trying to scrape around for paid pixel art jobs and build up some credibility by participating in actual game development because usually I just do art only, but rarely actual games. I'm a pixel artist and here's a lot of my better work over the years. My portfolio has mockups, UI, animations, characters, backgrounds, etc. so if you like my work, just give me a reply and we can figure out another way to DM later. https://cara.app/imonk

Hey everyone. Today I want to talk some fun pixel art stuff: mockups. I started 2 new ones and completed a total of 3 this December with just Aseprite and a mouse! And free time because I'm currently unemployed, but nothing fancy. They are these mockups here:

Maximo: Ghosts to Glory - Hell stage

Dark Souls - Lost Izalith level

Gauntlet Dark Legacy - Carnival Level

So how do I make these so fast? In short, years of practicing with pixel art and a mouse, but I have some tips anyway.

Brainstorming

To be honest for these mockups, most of the brainstorming is already done, because these are inspired by actual games that exist already. I just create the fan art in pixels by picking and choosing things from the game I want to show. But it's still important to brainstorm and decide what elements are most important and which are less important because more often than not, since art mockups aren't actual full games with the camera moving around to view entire levels or see a lot of the game, the canvas space can be limited and you'll have to find a way to cram the key ideas in.  Sometimes I'll have an original composition that just doesn't work so I'll have to change it, scrap some things, or alter the arrangement of sprites on the screen. But I usually think it's important to have at least one player, a few enemies, UI elements, and environmental elements that represent the game or level or whatever idea you're trying to get across for the game. To me, a mockup can't exist without those, but all the other extra details are often just spontaneous ideas I end up including for fun, if they fit in the mockup.

Value Sketching

It's not absolutely necessary, but I'm trying an art strategy to see if it helps me draw a bit faster, but so far I'm finding this process useful. I will start with a grayscale sketch of the mockup, absolutely no colors, or at least monochrome. The focus of this planning phase is to just get all the details planned out on screen with correct enough shading, but doesn't have to be perfect. Trying to get the colors down early before having the shading planned out kind of just stresses me out so I hold off on colors until later.

Using as many layers necessary, I'll do something like this first

or this

Coloring

Once you get here and decide it's good enough to start coloring, well then there's nothing to do but color. But I don't start by just manually picking and drawing in all the colors for every single pixel in the screen, and neither do I mess around with the grayscale layer(s). I keep the grayscale stuff locked as just shading reference. Instead in Aseprite, I create a new layer or 2 and set their mode to "overlay", and usually set their opacities to about 50% so that the colors aren't too opaque.  These layers allow you to just pick and paint simple base colors over the image and you don't have to re-shade manually anything. For example, grass -> green, wood -> brown, metal -> gray, gold -> yellowish orange, rocks -> gray, brown, red, skin -> brown, white, tan, pale, etc. My point is that you don't have to pick all the different shades of color. You just pick base colors and paint away. For example, with the Gauntlet UI elements, it starts grayscale:

I splash some base colors into the overlay. (Let me just hide the UI real quick to make a point)

And turning the underlying UI layer back on, we get this. It just needs clean up.

And these mockup images below are actual examples that aren't polished but apply this color method first.

Polish

So the overlay painting method is good for some quick coloring  and gets some decent colors, but not quite polished and final. It's great for creating a color reference sheet on screen. but it's still good to go back in and manually try to clean up the image on a separate new polish layer (or as many as you want). Clean up and simplify the color count because the overlay color painting usually can cause a lot of hiding extra colors difficult to see with the naked eye unless you zoom in. For example, you can see such extra colors here: (Also I apologize for the terrible jpeg quality. It has nothing to do with the point I'm trying to make here, but is actually a great bonus example of too many similar colors that can be reduced)

What I'll generally do is take the magic wand tool, set the tolerance to about 10 (in Aseprite) and start selecting groups of pixels with colors that are too similar, then just reduce them to a few key colors or clusters instead. This will result in very distinct colors in the end and cause less strain on our eyes. The palette becomes much cleaner and simpler to look at.

Hue-shifting

The other thing I need to mention is that up to this point, we'd still have to manually add hue-shifting because the original color overlay process does not include automatic hue-shifting unfortunately, so this is manual work, but the magic wand tool is useful for this process as well. You can just selecting groups of pixels on the canvas of matching color and slightly tweaking their hues as their shade changes. Maybe try out purple shadows, or yellow highlights. It's a bit experimental and depends on your lights, but try not to just stick with base colors only for everything. Try to add some subtle hue variety to the various shades of each of your sprites. 

For example this is a white skull, but has green highlights due to the green candles:

This is a red imp, but has blue lighting due to the large blue energy projectile coming his way.

Also just polish up any final details or mistakes left over. 

But that's all I got. I hope these tips are useful and have fun!

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