How to become a master of the industry: The first week - Thursday

Thursday, the day after meeting the guys from Codemasters and the thoughts running through my mind on the way to uni were along the lines of 'wow it's pretty nice weather today, I haven't even brought a jumper' and 'hmm I wonder what we're going to do today, and am I going to be able to pull this one off too?!'. Well as it turns out I feel really quite positive and happy after today's lesson.

So the whole day was based around pixel art, for those of you who don't know what it is it's basically creating images at a very low level of detail. The sort of detail that the very old NES games used to be at, 8BIT. So after a little introduction into the art we quickly get jumping straight into making our own, and it's all about making a believable small graphic which can be used over and over again next to one another without getting an obvious edge (also known as 'tiling'). This was used in all the old games to create environments, such as Mario and particularly Zelda (such as the forest areas and ground areas). So we then had a go at making tileable trees before moving onto making character sprites (a sprite is a 2D image that is always facing the screen). Making several sprites of the same character in different poses can give the illusion that it is moving, like running or dancing for example, also know as animation. So we had a quick go at creating our own characters.
My character was actually supposed to be some guy with headphones, a white t-shirt and some jeans dancing; but as the guys kept joking that it looked like Princess Leia from Star Wars I decided to change it slightly so that it looked like princess Leia dancing, and it goes beautiful with 'The Cantina Band' song from the movie. Magic!

I was done a lot more quickly that I had anticipated, an hour before the deadline we'd been set, and as we have been set with some 'homework' which is to create a pixel art version of myself in the style of Lylo and Stich', so I quickly got started on a mood board. Over the weekend I will be looking at creating this character. Have to admit that even though this is not an art style I am used to, it is quite enjoyable and a good experience; and I really look forward to seeing what the outcome will be, I have no doubt the others will have some interesting outcomes too, particularly Simon who happens to be somewhat of an expert at pixel art and clearly showed off his skill today by creating a whole usable character of the 'Zelda' type, along with some background graphics. This guy has talent; though I guess everybody on my course does in different ways, I am just hoping there is something for me out there too.

All in all it has to be said that pixel art is not as easy as it appears. Yes it looks low in quality and doesn't look as good as all this new technology, but by jove it's not easy to master. Essentially you are given the bare minimum to work with to create a believable and immersive world. Hats off to all the guys who worked on some of our favourite games from the NES and SNES generation, not only did you have a very low amount of pixels to work with, but you brought life and emotions to these little squares. Thank you!