How we did the pixel art

HOW WE DID THE PIXEL ART

There are two stories behind Inky and the Alien Aquarium’s art. The story of learning pixel art, color theory, and game design. The other story is how the game art was technically assembled.  We’re going to stick to the technical side in our Kickstarter story.

Tile Based Graphics

Inky and the Alien Aquarium is a tile-based video game. Tile based graphics were originally a solution to a technical performance limitation. In tile based games the playing area is created with small images laid out in a grid called tiles.  It takes less resources to create images from reusable components stored than storing the full images. The Game Boy Advance screen is 240 x 160 pixels. So rather than storing our graphics as individual screens we stored 8x8 tiles to be assembled into those screens.

Tilesets 

The complete set of tiles available is called a tileset.  Inky and the Alien Aquarium’s tileset was limited to 512 tiles.

Inky and the Alien Aquarium takes place on an alien mothership. Aliens abducted sea creatures from Earth to put on display in the aquarium aboard the ship. In order to save the sea creatures and escape the mothership, Inky must work their way through the ship, room by room, solving puzzles and finding items to gain access to new areas.

It took 33,000 tiles to create the 50 rooms on the alien mothership. Our technical decisions limited us to 512 unique tiles.

We used Aseprite to draw the world. Then cut and pasted the tiles for various components into the tileset. We used Tiled an open-sourced level editor to place the tiles in the tilemap. A tilemap is a map of how the tiles are used to create a game's world.

With limited tiles available it was important to make sure every tile on the tileset was used. Sean built a tool that looks at the tilemap and the tileset and identifies how many times each tile is used. This allowed us to identify tiles that weren't used. It also identified duplicated tiles.

The rest of the art for the game was stored as sprite sheets. These are the art for Inky and their animation frames, the objects, title screen, user interface, and cutscenes.