I’ve been working on my 2D pixel art platformer game for about 10 months now and decided it was time to blog about it. The main reason is that I had to jump through quite a few hoops in the process and I wanted to share the things I learned in the process.

Here’s a screenshot to give you an impression:

Screenshot

Some of my goals for this game are:

  • Make it play like a classic platformer in terms of timing and game mechanics, it should feel very polished in terms of game interaction.
  • Keep it simple but not simplistic.
  • Make it look familiar but make sure it has a unique touch as well, something that spurs interest of the player.
  • Make sure the project stays feasible so don’t lose yourself in details too much (this is very hard!).
  • In essence, make it look and feel the way I like it to be as a fan of pixel art games.

The biggest challenge hasn’t been programming though but drawing pixel art, which I had no experience with. I’ve always loved pixel art though and I really wanted to learn to draw my own. It’s still an ongoing process (isn’t it always?) but I think I have been making quite a lot of progress.