Keeping it simple with skinny pixel art

After a couple of days trying to get the feel of Spine 2D and its skeleton animation system, I was forced to admit I was not enjoying working with it. I am sure it is a great tool when you know what you are doing, but I have not managed to find my groove with it yet; and to be honest, wrestling with it is demotivating.

I started to look at the spine animation tools built into Godot, but before I could convince myself to give them a serious go, I began to feel that this was not the right direction. The more I looked at the examples and tutorials, the more I realised I did not like the style. There is something… off about spine animation unless it is done really, really well—and I certainly was not good enough to do it well at all. Even before I started, I knew it was not the right art style for the game I was making. The idea was that it would be quick and easy to iterate on. Certainly right now, it was not.

So I was stuck. My current pixel art was too time-consuming to work with, and my hope for a simple spine animation alternative had proved not viable.

I very briefly thought about going on Fiverr and commissioning one of the many amazing pixel artists there to get me started. That way, I told myself, I could get cracking on coding features and building the world, while having great artwork that would give it that “wow” factor. That would almost certainly have been a mistake. If I could not recreate the style myself, I would end up having to pay the same artist to do all the art to keep the look consistent. At the very least that would get expensive, and at worst it would make me dependent on someone else for a massive portion of the game.

And so…

I looked at the long list of animations I wanted for my character and thought about my options. I fired up Aseprite and got to work.

One good thing had come out of the last few days. During my lengthy thinking about the character design and movement sets, the narrative of my game had started to take shape—something that would tie it all together: the feel I wanted and the gameplay. With that in mind, I created something simple, but with the right feel and, critically, something that should be much easier to work with. Taking inspiration from what I will call the “skinny pixel art style”, I kept the arms and legs at a single pixel and did not worry about eyes. With those constraints in place, animation should be simpler, and the rest of the body shape quickly materialised.

No animations created as yet, but that will be a job for tomorrow.