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Clouds practice #3

I did two studies of clouds all the way back in March and April 2018. Now that I've been looking at all the amazing skies during sunsets in Tahiti, I had to get back to it.

This time it's painted from my own reference with colors mostly picked plein air at a different sunset with similar conditions (Atari 2600 palette, as always).

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California Sunset

First artwork of 2025. I tried to retain the expressiveness of my pixel paintings but also clean it up and make the clusters at the edges reminiscent of impressionistic painting where there are abstract blobs of color that slowly get representational towards the center.

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Last week was crazy full of pixel art titles so it's time for another Pixel Art News!

Featuring: 🔪 RetroRealms 💾 Saveseeker 🌆 Devil's Hideout ⛏️ Odd Realm 🛡️ Knights of the Road 🏹 Arco 💎 The Crimson Diamond 🏝️ Castaway 🥕 Gourdlets 💖 Wholesome Games Steam Celebration 🎨 Pixelorama

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After the exceptionally long PixElated Festival episode we're back with a more chill look at the upcoming and newly released pixel art games (lots of cozy stuff in there this time).

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9 years ago (minus 2 days), I posted this image to announce the launch of my Kickstarter for a game called Pixel Art Academy, an adventure where you would become an art student and learn how to draw.

While the path hasn't led all the way to the city of Retropolis yet, 2 days from now, on the 9th anniversary of the Kickstarter launch, the game's Learn Mode will launch into Early Access on Steam. It's a smaller version of the full game I imagined, but the good part is that you will be able to start learning with it straight away.

Check the trailer below and wishlist on Steam to be notified when it launches on August 5.

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My big coverage of the PixElated Festival is here!

See which games impressed me the most with their art style and then go find your own favorites on the Steam sale page.

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This has been amazing and nerve-wracking to watch! Luckily, the game didn't break and only one tutorial lesson was really bad (as I already knew), so I think it was a success?

my friend made a game about learning pixel art that will go into early access this August! I want to check it out on stream! let's play, chill and chat 🐸

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9 days till release …

I hope you will enjoy doing pixel art in my cozy pixel art game.

Wishlist here.

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This is it! I can officially announce that my game Pixel Art Academy: Learn Mode will launch into Steam Early Access on August 5!

It'll be the 9th anniversary of the Pixel Art Academy Kickstarter that day and about 1.5 years since I decided to take the educational core of my adventure game and release it as a standalone, downloadable Learn Mode that focuses just on the educational parts without the story elements.

The reception of Learn Mode has been great so far and people seem to enjoy learning digital drawing and pixel art fundamentals through a video game. Whew! I'm far from done though, but the first chapter focusing on lines will be getting released now before I finish the other 6 out of 7 elements of art throughout Early Access.

Here's the release date announcement trailer and don't forget to wishlist the game—or play the demo—on Steam if it looks interesting to you!

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Guess what, Pixel Art News is back! … For the Summer.

Those of you who have been around the block for a while now—in particular in 2017—will remember my monthly YouTube show where I covered upcoming and newly released games along with random pixel art bits and pieces and a DIY section.

I'm not committing to reviving it, but I will create a few episodes this Summer, calling it #SummerOfPixelArt (it's not really a thing, I just made it up). On the plus side, I record it weekly now on Twitch and you can even catch individual news as shorts on places like TikTok and Instagram.

In the latest episode, among other things, I give recommendations of important pixel art games for their art direction + they are 50% off or cheaper on Steam Summer Sale. This includes tumblr folks such as @dpadstudio, @thimbleweedpark, @danfessler, and @johanvinet!

I've done 4 episodes so far, here are the other 3 you have missed if you don't follow me on YouTube, X, or Facebook where I also upload them.

Also, here is the episode cover again, featuring key art from Pathway, as otherwise this post won't appear on my front page. Whoops!

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When I was watching the trailer for Arco at Summer Game Fest, I thought to myself, those trees sure look like something Franek would draw. Sure enough, the environment artist from Kingdom: Norse Lands is indeed one of the 4 developers behind this story-rich tactical turn-based RPG, mesmerizing us with breathtaking scenes of grandiosity.

I played the demo on Steam (macOS, Windows) and enjoyed the unique fighting system, a blend of turns and active pause. You plan your moves based on telegraphed actions and watch the turn play out in real-time. As for the full game—potentially coming out this year—I'm looking forward to experience the Tarantino-esque intertwining of the "3 tales forged in bloodshed, laced with magic, and united by revenge."

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Noah Cai, better known as Pixel Architect on YouTube, has been posting inspiring devlogs of Chef RPG to his channel for almost 4 years now. As a former architectural designer, he brings a specialized set of processes to his ever-improving pixel art skills.

Chef RPG is clearly inspired by Stardew Valley, expanding it with many activities such as hunting and cooking mini-games as you manage your very own restaurant in a quaint, seaside town.

We just received a new trailer for the game along with a September 12 release date (Early Access). You can wishlist the game on its Steam page.

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It's been a hot minute, I should really spend more time back here.

(Saying it today so if I fail, it's a (bad) joke. 😬)

In the meantime, here's some fan art I recently made.

…

Reflecting on it a bit more, I think I put my bar up quite high for what to post since everything appears on the front page as a newspaper article. But I really want to post more just casually. Maybe not everything needs to be a proper article/review/whatever. More like back in 2010 when this whole blog started.

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The art of Wargroove 2 is wonderful! Chucklefish's second original IP (after Starbound) finally got a sequel today and oh, it's a lovely world to dive into. Instead of being developed in-house as the original, the second installment of the tactical turn-based strategy is brought to us by one of my favorite studios, Robotality, whose shading-bending game Pathway was previously published by Chucklefish.

The collaboration between the two developers clearly paid off as Wargroove 2 gets the trademark mood lighting of Robotality's art director Simon Bachman on top of the original Wargroove cuteness. The shading is not as crazy as Pathway's fully dynamic engine—instead, Wargroove 2 enhances the visuals of the Halley engine with subtler animated halos around characters, both in-game and in the many story cutscenes.

The game stays smartly close to the original by keeping everything you loved while introducing more content, more factions, more units, more strategy, more everything! As a big fan of Advance Wars back in the day, I had a great time, but there are plenty of other 9/10 reviews that can more sufficiently speak of Wargroove 2's gameplay goodness.

If you're up for some cozy turn-based tactics (as cozy and wholesome as a war-themed game can be), you can get the game on Steam ($20, Windows only) or Switch.

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Lily pads

Starting a new series of paintings called Sweden (since they'll be landscapes from around Spelkollektivet where I live now).

Mostly done with Pixquare—the iPad app I reviewed a few posts back—plus some Aseprite and Blender for heavy lifting on the reflections.

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Things are getting real! My game, Pixel Art Academy, designed for learning how to draw pixel art, now has a Steam page!

In particular, the version I'll release on Steam is called Pixel Art Academy: Learn Mode. It's a standalone, single-player artist simulator where you actually learn to draw! You'll go through interactive tutorials, complete challenges, and make art for different projects (mostly pixel art video games).

If this is the first time you've heard of Pixel Art Academy, it's a game I started working on 8 years ago with the idea of making a text/point-and-click adventure/RPG where you play as an art student. The kicker is that to improve your character's skills in-game, you gain them yourself in real life!

Even though I've been working hard on this project for many years, it's far from finished since it's very ambitious and I'm mostly working on it alone. There are some parts that are already polished and work well, in particular the learning core of the game. That's what I'll be releasing as Learn Mode. You'll skip all the character creation and go straight into pixel art, something many have been asking for (to just learn as fast as possible). Hopefully, it will become exactly that: the fastest, most fun way to learn drawing in the form of a video game.

If you like the idea, check out the new Steam Page. Wishlists are of course hugely appreciated!

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I never played Karateka in the 80s, but as a big fan of Prince of Persia and Jordan Mechner's journals, I was stoked to hear that an interactive documentary about Jordan's prototypical cinematic platformer was in the works by Digital Eclipse.

Released this week, The Making of Karateka on the surface looks like any other game you buy through Steam ($20, Windows-only), GOG, or whichever favorite store or console you prefer (available also for Xbox, PS4/5, Switch). Once the thing loads though, you really get 3 things: a documentary, the original Karateka, and a new remaster.

The documentary part is an audio-visual slideshow retelling Jordan's development story starting with his teenage years pitching his earlier title Deathbounce to the publishing house Brøderbund. It's an interesting look into the iterative process, seen through correspondence letters, journal entries, and many playable builds at various stages of completion. After we reach the eventual rejection of that title, Jordan comes back with a prototype of a visual-narrative experience unseen on home computers. We get to follow Karateka's full life cycle from pre- to post-production, ending with the conception of its sequel (which eventually turned into Prince of Persia). It's a real treasure trove! Fellow pixel artists will appreciate the many graph-paper sketches and interactive overlays of final game sprites compared to rotoscoped outlines and filmed footage. There are also video segments, from a comprehensive breakdown of the music to interviews with other developers reflecting on the impact Jordan's games had on their careers. You'll even encounter a fan letter signed by the one and only "John Romero, Disciple of the Great Jordan and worshipper of the Magnificent Mechner!" (I kid you not, you can't make this stuff up).

Perhaps just as crucial for an interactive documentary like this, you can launch any of the floppy disks in the emulator, trying out various iterations and ports of Karateka.

The emulation is fantastic and lets you fiddle with display settings (monochrome or color display, scanlines, pixel perfect or zoomed) as well as enhance the frame rate. You can even rewind the many deaths you will face if you've never played the game before (like me). If you spend some more time obsessing over the weird artifacts of the Apple II hi-res graphics, you might even go down the rabbit hole of realizing that on the Apple II you didn't really paint colors as much as you used different monochrome dithering patterns that the graphics display would then turn into 4 different hues. A fascinating learning experience if you include some of your own research online!

Add to this the Commodore 64 and the Atari 8-bit versions to compare how the graphics got adapted across the earlier ports and you have a nice way to relieve the mid-80s with a bit of help from modern emulation (I did beat the C64 version without rewinding though!). I'd love to see more art from the other remakes, especially the 16-bit Atari ST port, but I understand their decision to omit playable versions of those due to the lower quality on the gameplay side of the translations.

This brings us to the final part of the package, the modern remaster. Unlike the 2012 complete reimagining of the game (with 3D graphics and all), Digital Eclipse approached the remake as the ultimate port of the original to an imaginary system along the lines of a 90s VGA PC.

It's well done. Some of the fully-redrawn scenes are a bit overpainted for my taste (I'd prefer a pixel art rendition of the castle than a blurry photographic collage, although there were many games in the 90s that did take this approach), but the in-game graphics are really in style, including the smooth animations that are like one would imagine granted a beefier CPU. It's also a sort of director's cut with previously unseen scenes added, in particular, the battle with the leopard as a clever action-puzzle in the middle. The AI is unfortunately even less challenging than Jordan's implementation. As great as the 6-move fighting system could have been, you yet again resort to simply kicking away opponents as they tirelessly crawl into your range. There isn't even the nuance from the original where you were the one who had to approach some enemies with skilled timing. On the other hand, you now have optional goals and achievements that make the repetitive/easy combat work in your favor (stringing various combos, beating opponents or the level under a time limit …). As the Digital Eclipse president Mike Mika admits at the end of the welcome commentary mode, they didn't manage to achieve their perfect port, but they did come close.

In conclusion, I thoroughly enjoyed playing both the original as well as the remake and while the combat system lacks any sort of depth beneath its stunning animations, Karateka is instead a monumental experience for its presentation. Big characters with personality and realistic motion are displayed through cinematic camera cuts and story vignettes (3 years before Ron Gilbert came up with the word "cutscene"). There are details like animating the unfortunate falling off the cliff at the start of the game, or respectfully bowing to the first guard as they bow in return. Jordan's creative work is precious and worth the attention this release gifts it.

I highly recommend The Making of Karateka to all retro gamers and/or game developers for its immersive documentation which provides an experience that goes beyond the usual video documentaries. It's interactive—just like the subject it's talking about—something I want to see more in the future. And if the $20 by any chance seems high to you, consider that the original retailed at $35 (and that was in 1984 dollars).