One of the biggest obstacles I had to face while making my game Agartha was dealing with the fact that my brother would not help me when it came to in-game artwork. This was a major setback because how could I develop a game without the sprites needed to conduct the tests? After all I am not an artist! And I didn't have the time to sit down and take the time at perfecting my art skills. What helped me out was looking to a system whose games did not focus so much on graphics but game play - the NES. The NES with it's limited color pallet and resolution seemed to be the key to figuring out how I would begin my quest to becoming a sprite artist, after all NES graphic designers didn't have to be very good in the early days.
The first game I focused on was the original Super Mario Bros, if you ever looked at the Mario sprite, it's very simple, consisting of only 3 colors (at least thats what I counted). So my first task was to develop a style similar to the one used in Super Mario, (after all I wasn't an artist). Although the graphics of Super Mario were poor, maybe I could make Agartha with a focus on game play, rather than visuals. The original sprite I used for the main character was not very impressive at all, it was a dolphin, consisting of only 4 colors! The sprite was roughly 32x32 pixels in size, I designed simple level elements like plants rocks and other objects using those dimensions. Because I wasn't an artist I made the decision to make the game big enough to fit in a 320x240 window and use scaling to expand it to a large 640x480 sized image.
When I got down to making the new Super Mario'sh sprites, there was only one problem, they looked lame, I've seen role playing games with better artwork than what I had made. So I studied one of my favorite RPG's, Final Fantasy 6 (FF6) for the SNES. The sprites in FF6 were very small, at least 32x32 if not a little larger than that. The FF6 sprites like the Super Mario sprites, didn't use too many colors. What made the FF6 sprites stand out where the outlines that gave them definition. I began working on a new sprite concept that was a little close to what FF6 had. An important fact needed for decent looking sprites was creating the shadow and highlight.
If you have a rock thats brown, the shadow should be obviously a dark brown that lines the lower rear. The rock should have a small section at the top left thats made up of a lighter brown to give the illusion of a light source. You can enhance the look of this concept rock by adding two shades of dark brown for the shadow and two shades of light brown for the highlight. Like our example rock, you would apply this to a character sprite, if there is no room for a shadow or highlight don't use it! For me a single sprite can take anywhere from ten minutes to an hour, even if the sprite is a small 48x48 sized sprite.
I started to feel comfortable with sprite making, the Final Fantasy 6 sprites had a style that were fairly decent to make and were small enough in size where I didn't have to apply too much detail. My sprites were coming out great, so I grew arrogant and attempted something larger, however I was brought back to reality, I am not an artist.
However with the technique I came up with I was able to make sprites good enough for a simple game, I felt what I had achieved looked better than some games on Game Gear. It wouldn't be to long until I ran into another barrier - designing the level.
When making a level it's best to have a few sets of tiles to use, in the game Ecco the Dolphin the tiles are as large as 128x128 pixels and mashed together in a way where you'd never suspect parts being reused. The 128x128 tiles can be broken up in to smaller 64x64 tiles and broken up further into 32x32 pixel patterns. The point is, in order to make a level, you need to cheat! I wasn't very good with making tiles, but because of a mistake, I came up with a technique that worked. I started off making 3 or 4 different colored rocks, the rocks didn't look too good, while using Photoshop I had each rock in a separate layer. Being frustrated with my poor looking rocks, I walked away from the computer to take a break. When I came back to the computer I noticed my two image layers were overlaying over one another and the result - a perfectly good looking tile. Since making that mistake I have adopted a technique and I have used it ever since, to make decent looking rock patterns. The way it worked? Take rock A + rock B and it equals tile C!
If your new to pixel art, just look at screenshots of different games and adopt a style you think you're capable of. Don't worry so much as the size of your images, pretty much sprites in video games are dramatically stretched from their original size. You will need a good graphics program in order to create sprites, I currently use Gimp and whats great about it, is it's free, and offers many tools found in Photoshop. If there is one important fact about video game graphics design that I should leave you with it's, if you do develop a style, make sure your whole game reflects that style; this means don't try to use works from others that don't match with your art style, it looks amateurish.
Related: Arkonviox.com - Agartha
Further Reading: So You Want to be a Pixel Artist?
