Dragon's Den Update 1.29.26
PIX26 and other things
Greetings fellow Stackers! As you might have noticed, I’ve been less active on here, and, as I said at the beginning of the year, not posting weekly series. That doesn’t mean I’ve not been busy! Beyond the daily grind of homeschooling kids, chores, errands, and battling the oh-so-massive (/s) historic snowstorm of 2026, I’ve also been painting miniatures, practicing pixel art (for a whopping thirty days straight!), and writing on my novel.
I was also featured on The Lone Toad, with an article about playing and writing in a shared world based on my experiences with “Iron Shorts” last year. You can check that out here.
PIX26
One of my projects for 2026 is to practice and develop my skill in pixel art. It is one of my favorite art styles, stretching back to hours playing Gameboy as a kid and, more recently, admiring games like Octopath Traveler and Stardew Valley. I’d done some dabbling in pixel art before, doing variant forms for some Pokemon sprites, but never anything substantial or with purpose. This year, that is changing.
I spent the days between Christmas and New Year’s Day piddling with 16x16 pixel front sprites using the color palette for Gameboy Studio. That produced a few that I’m quite proud of. I’m quite proud of the Vampire (line 1, sprite 6), Drow (line 1, sprite 7), Minotaur (line 2, sprite 1), Werewolf (line 2, sprite 3), and Venom (line 3, sprite 6). It is quite difficult to create recognizable figures in such a small space, but I think these (for the most part, looking at you “ninja turtle”) turned out quite well.
Of course, making sprites in the palette and dimensions of a Gameboy game studio sent me into a whole “let’s make a little Gameboy game” spiral. I drew several character sprite sheets for this potential game: a player character, a female villager, a male villager, a pixie, and a guard. Sprite sheets, for those that don’t know, have nine sections each corresponding to a animation state for the character sprite (walking down, right, and up; idle down, right, up). I found trying to figure out how to make a readable walking sprite extremely difficult in this small scale, as you can probably see in the sprites below.
Of course, making sprites for a game demands that I also have maps for the sprites to move around on. In my first attempts, I drew everything one pixel at a time, and it took ages and lots of trial and error to get things looking presentable. I started with a single room dungeon/sewer cell, that eventually grew into a full on prison scene using the spearman/guard sprite heavily.
When drawing these little scenes, I began to wonder if I could translate my map-making skills into pixels. After years of drawing maps, I finally settled on a consistent way of making mountains (my biggest struggle for ages). So, I decided to try replicating that but in pixel art. This produced what you might call a quasi-parallax scene (think the opening video in a lot of old Gameboy games)—its obviously not really parallax since it doesn’t move and doesn’t quite have the foreground and background elements, but it kind of pulls from that idea. I was very happy with how the mountain turned out, and it has inspired me to possibly make some pixel maps in the future.
Following on the footsteps of these, I watched some tutorials about tile maps. This took up about two weeks of my brain space, as I piddled with trying to get things to line up correctly and to accurately reflect the image of the world and interiors in my head. Using copious references from pixel art asset packs on itch.io and Google Images, I finally settled on a relatively complete (for what I needed) “world” tile map complete with rocks, trees, ground and path textures, houses, a barn, fencing, and several other little elements.
While I’ve been really satisfied with the world tiles, the interior tiles have been a huge struggle. Some elements work great, and others I wish were better. It was here that I ultimately burned out on trying to make tile maps and, ultimately, a game. It was just too much work and was pulling focus away from the other things I wanted to work on this year. I did, however, make some really fun maps with these tile sets using the free program Tiler.
I’ll close this out with some of the more recent pixel art I’ve done, this time in color and larger (48x48 pixels). I’m quite proud of how these came out, and a person on TikTok asked if they could purchase one for their game (I didn’t sell, but it was flattering all the same). I’ve even developed lore for these! Perhaps I’ll do a Creature Feature lore drop for some of these soon!
Have you been participating in PIX26, or any other year-based project (Dungeon26, etc.)? I’d love to see what you’ve been up to!
Wow how good do all these look? Takes me right back to my childhood.