Hello!
I recently announced Terminal Reign and one of the big things that meant for me is that I can start writing dev logs again. So I thought I'd start by talking about my trials and tribulations while trying to create my capsule art as pixel art.
First off, one hoped-for side effect of writing these dev logs is that they bring a little more attention to my games, and in particular the game this dev log is about, Terminal Reign. So if you haven't already, please check it out and wishlist it if it takes your fancy.
TL;DR
Pixel art is difficult to have looking nice and readable on the Steam Store as the images you provide are often resized, meaning your nice crisp pixels end up squashed and messy looking. I went back and forth between rendered and pixel art a few times before I just settled on rendered versions for the Steam Store and pixel art versions for wherever they're actually readable (like the final image of the trailer).
I can probably sum up the lessons learnt as such:
- Other games' pixel art capsules use 4x4 and above sized pixels (relative to the resolutions required by Steam).
- Preview the pixel art on the store page as soon as you can, and not just by taking a screenshot of a store page and pasting your capsule onto it, you need to see how Steam handles your images.
I did not use any Generative AI during this whole process.
For the rendered art work I used Paint.Net, and for the pixel art I used Aseprite.
Why a pixel art capsule?
The simple answer to "Why?" is, because the game itself is pixel art and I want the cover art to match the game as best as I can. I also wanted to have a real go at doing the cover art myself, and I have a little more experience with pixel art now, so why not challenge myself?
I read a little online about people's expectations when it comes to cover art vs game art, and there seemed to be no clear consensus on whether matching or non-matching was better. Some said they would really expect pixel art cover art if the game itself is pixel art, and some said that people don't care and non-pixel art cover art tends to look better and attract more people to the actual page. My personal feeling is that I would expect the cover art to match the game art, but also that rendered cover art would pull a wider audience (at least to open up the store page).
I didn't actually see mentioned the main problems that I encountered, so my hope in writing this is that I'll better prepare someone else in the future.
Initial mockup and design
The initial plan was to first come up with a decent enough design and then decide whether I could realistically translate it to pixel art. I liked the idea of using a 7 Segment Display for the text (since they're used a little in the game and give a nice retro interface feel) then realised that 14 Segment Displays are a thing and went with that. It took a bit of experiment and also taking a break to work on other game stuff before it started to click for me, but I eventually ended up with the rough design below which felt good to me (and the final design itself didn't stray too much from it).
Conversion to pixel art
I was a bit apprehensive about whether I could actually do the conversion properly but decided to have a go anyway, thinking even if it looked terrible I'd learn something anyway and I could still fall back on the rendered version.
After much messing around and experimenting with colours (ones that were closer to the palette used in the game art), I ended up with something I was pretty pleased with and could also be used at the different aspect ratios required by the Steam Store. I'd opted to draw the pixel art at half the required resolution (Steam Header Capsule is 920x430, so my pixel art canvas was 460x215), so I'd have 2x2 pixels, which I thought would be
Uploading to the store page
Now came the time to upload the artwork to Steam, check that it looked fine next to the screenshots, and then move on to the next task (or so I thought). After uploading and previewing it was pretty clear that it wasn't coming across as clean and readable (see the below screenshot). It turns out that the 920x430 capsule gets halved down to 460x215 when displayed in the store page, at least when I viewed it on my 1920x1200 monitor, so any definition in the pixel art was lost.
My thinking now was that if the pixels in my artwork were even bigger (say 4x4) then it would actually come across as clean and crisp when displayed on the store page. I tried redrawing at this resolution and pixel size but really wasn't happy with the results, or maybe I was feeling somewhat defeated after finishing up all the pixel artwork for each resolution.
Looking at other games that have pixel art capsules, like Stardew Valley or Noita, it's clear that a pixel size like 4x4 or greater is what's needed to come across nicely. When I redrew my artwork at 4x4 (sorry I don't have or can't seem to find the image) I felt like there was too much going on with the radar lines and that the whole thing looked like a jagged mess. Stardew's art has really nice contrasting colours and organic shapes that are easy to read, and Noita's is 90% text with a clear gradient texture. All my lines and circles had too many angles to convey in a clear way at that resolution.
Back to rendered
In the end I decided to go back to the rendered style and not use any more time or energy trying to get the pixel art to work how I'd like. This didn't take too long, as I still had a lot of the original mock up files still separated into layers, and I'd even written down my process of achieving the effects I wanted in Paint.Net, plus I already knew how I wanted everything laid out.
Overall
A lot of time spent but a lot of lessons learnt. My advice to others would be to upload your artwork and preview it as soon as possible, and then compare it with other games' artwork that's in a similar style and ask yourself why theirs works and yours doesn't.
I'll caveat all of this advice with the fact that I'm very much a noob with pixel art and I'm also a terminally do-it-yourself guy, so I'm quite happy to put myself through all this even if I could have got better results by hiring someone, just so I can learn something and also be able to say "I did that". There are fabulous pixel artists out there that wouldn't have had the problems I was having (and I cringe at the idea of them reading this...), so hiring a real pro for your cover art is always a good idea.
As another plus, I now have two full sets of cover art, one rendered and one pixel art, which feels quite handy. I've used the the pixel art ones in places where I have more control over the display, and the rendered ones where I don't.
If you've made it this far, thank you so much for reading. :)