Hi, this is Julian from Pugstorm, and today I'll give you a little insight behind the art of Radical Rabbit Stew.
As the pixel artist creating all the assets for the game, I had to be a jack-of-all-trades and all-seeing eye regarding concept art, environment assets, animation and so on.
Luckily, I have a huge passion for these things. Much of my inspiration is drawn from having grown up in the ‘90s, where pixel art was still going strong in video games. The hilarious bosses from Parodius, the parallax landscapes in Pop´n TwinBee, or lush environments from the likes of Tales of Phantasia, all were incorporated into Radical Rabbit Stew in one or another way.
The limitations of pixel art can be turned into its strengths, as it is cost-effective at presenting good-looking assets in a video game and challenges the artist to even think more in terms of design and colour. Even with a background in illustration, I learned so much over the course of working on Radical Rabbit Stew due to these limitations. Here are some of the first assets I made and some of the latest.
Kind of different, huh?
Creating the environment assets that you can see in each level was the biggest workload of all the graphics in Radical Rabbit Stew, but it was a lot of fun each time.
Once we had decided on a world theme, getting it sketched out was the first part. Even though it is a pixel art game, I wanted to do this step properly.
Below you can see some ideas for the World 1 environment I was sketching, the themes we went for were grasslands and rabbits in space.
Then, I would put these sketches up as a reference on my other screen and begin slowly drawing the assets in pixel form. The trick is to keep the essential feel of the sketch intact - and be aware of the small sizes you're working with - while constantly zooming out and checking if the asset is even readable as a whole. Repeat until satisfied.
The exact process for each asset is a little different every time but in general it breaks down to this:
1. Draw out the general shape
2. Clean up the shape and define surfaces hit by light
3. Add more detail and introduce more colors (also a cast shadow in this example)
4. Spice everything up and add highlights (my favourite!)
There is a lot of back and forth on these steps and the final part is simply making sure that every pixel has its reason for existing.
Working from a sketch to a small asset is one thing, but I also had to do the reverse.
The Mama boss you're fighting in the game is based off of an upscaled normal rabbit.
We had used these rabbit sprites as a placeholder when setting up the boss fight and later on decided that we'd like to have them cleaned up to be in tune with the other pixel art. So that meant I had to pick each sprite we used and make a bigger version of it with 3 x times more detail and an equal amount of character.
What I thought would be a very tedious procedure became very interesting as I could flesh out how the rabbits looked when they're not sitting in a small 16x16 pixel frame.
And then, as we replaced the old sprites with my new ones in the animation, the boss really came together and looked alive. I would show you but I guess you'll have to see for yourself when the game comes out.
Another thing you should be looking forward to are the funny story snippets we present between chapters. In fact, they were my second favourite thing to work on in Radical Rabbit Stew (with the top favourite being the final boss, you'll love that one).
These story snippets, or slides as we call them, deliver the backstory behind Radical Rabbit Stew between gameplay and are presented in an old-school-cinema style. (Also while looking goofy, fitting the humour of the game.)
That was my time to shine as an illustrator and I decided to only use 5 tones of grayscale to keep my focus off the colours and on the characters.
Before going into pixel work I created a quick storyboard of each scene in which the story was condensed in very few images. Below, you can see the intro scene:
It looked pretty rough but gave me enough direction to start working. The intro, especially, was something we fiddled with pretty early in game development, and back then the style of those slides was still very different. My first take was to do a clean sketch of each image in Photoshop like I would with a high resolution artwork and then scale it down to have it fit our game's dimensions while also reducing the colours to 5.
For the first versions of the game that looked fine, but as development progressed and my pixel skills got better, we had to face the fact that we would need to brush up on those graphics. So I recreated the intro slides in proper pixel art as well as adding more slides for the rest of the game. The result was way more time-consuming (6-7 weeks in total), but it looked much better and when we finally placed them in the game we knew it was time well spent. Have a look at this merry scene:
Pretty cool, I think.
There is a whole lot more to making the art for a video game and I would love to keep on rambling, but that should be it for today. I really hope you enjoyed this little insight behind the flavours of pixel art.
If you're hungry for more or want to see those graphics in action make sure to Wishlist Radical Rabbit Stew, and keep your eyes open for the release next month!