I participated in a pixel art jam

This will just be a quick little hobby post, but I wanted to say that I took part in this year’s GameBoy Pixel Art Jam hosted by GB Studio Central over on itch.io to try and be part of a community. For those that don’t know (like me), an art jam is a big collaborative event for artists to produce works in a limited time to a revealed theme. What attracted me to it is that it’s not at all competitive, there is no ‘winning’ the art jam, it’s just a creative experiment and a fun communal challenge. This appealed to me as someone who had very recently taken up pixel art as a side hobby, and certainly not built up a skill set or experience with it. So, I decided to join, and thought I’d also post my small amount of practice pictures and my final result here, as a humbling form of progress in public.

My short journey before the jam

My first experience making my own pixel art was during early high school, when I tried making my own Pokemon fusions from sprite sheets I found online. Around this time I wasn’t really taking art seriously, and didn’t really build a foundation that I could later rely on. It wasn’t until I got into photography near the end of my schooling that I started taking a proper interest in the arts. Over the years that followed I tried lots of new mediums and found that I really enjoyed discovering how deep and wide some hobbies are. There are many things I feel you can only begin to appreciate once you’ve tried to do it yourself. So anyway, back to pixels. A few years ago I remember trying to create a custom character mod for Noita based on the Final Fantasy black mage, and spending hours modifying a sprite sheet to achieve this. Besides that, I didn’t really have anything. Even just in the visual medium, I have much more experience in image manipulation and compositing compared to illustration.

This small collection is pretty much everything I had made before entering the jam. There was some extra practicing I did, particularly around the tutorials, which I simply did not like looking at and ultimately did not end up saving. I would’ve liked to include them here, but ah well. Additionally, instead of Frieza I originally did a Billy Bat panel that I thought was turning out beautifully, but my computer crashed halfway through making it without saving. The idea of restarting it at this point was soul-crushing, so I gave it a few days and picked a new one.

The jam itself

The rules

I’ll keep it short and sweet. The image has to be on a canvas of 160×144, the GameBoy’s native resolution. The image was to be 1-bit, only two colours, full white and full black. Due to a hardware limitation, the final image could only be made of 192 unique 8×8 tiles. Once the jam starts, you will have 3 days to finish and submit your piece. Finally, the image must be themed around ‘Balance’.

My work

After a lot of deliberating I decided I enjoyed the concept of someone walking on a tightrope above a city skyline, and thought it would make for a good silhouette/backdrop. I considered a bus perched on a cliff’s edge or an image composed of equal black and white pixels, but thought the tightroper would be the way to go. I found some reference images online and started a basic layout. It was after this that I thought it might be fun to involve some GUI elements as if it was a minigame. With this in mind I tried thinking of how this game would be themed, and remembered watching Lupin III’s wacky antics in Hayao Miyazaki’s Castle Of Cagliostro and thought he might be an appropriate character to base this game off. As I was blocking out his shape and costume I came up with a headcanon that he had just finished stealing something from a skyscraper, and was hurriedly escaping across a somewhat taut tightrope before an investigating police helicopter caught on. Mechanically, I also pictured a balance bar at the top of the screen which is controlled via the left and right buttons on the D-pad, and his cautious steps controlled by alternating the A and B buttons. Below is my first saved draft, when I had done the basic blocking and experimented with some UI choices, and the final submitted image.

An element that I found very funny about this pixel art challenge was the 192 unique tile limit. I chose to ignore this until I was finished, then simply refine tiles until I reached this number. Luckily I left myself a decent amount of white space, as I was about 50 tiles over the limit from memory. A majority of this came from trying to make the buildings all unique to eachother, or diagonal designs clipping one pixel into additional tiles.

I was really proud of myself for finishing this piece and committing to actually posting it publicly online, even if I can’t help but see the errors I made along the way. I think it’s important to acknowledge that no one is a prodigy right from the start, and that it’s passion and experience that make experts and masters. So, even if I’m embarrassed by the little mistakes I can see, overall I’m happy just to have participated and given it my all!

Also, I must say, what got me back into pixel art was a video by Brandon James Greer delving into the first Pokemon generations’ trainer sprites, and all the tiny choices that gave them their style. While researching for a different post I was planning, I came across the pixel art jam and saw his name attached, and decided to throw my hat in. Upon submitting my piece, I embarrassingly thought “oh, imagine if he makes a video about this jam, and I happen to be in it? That’d be sick”. A bit premature a thought for someone who had only been doing pixel art for like, a month? Aside from that, I thoroughly enjoyed participating in a forum for the topic, and felt a sense of online community which I honestly haven’t before.

Oh and, in this particular video at this timestamp, do you spot something in the background?

Legitimately made my week, such a small moment but really meant a lot to me, just to feel included in this event. I recommend that if any of you have a hobby which you enjoy, you should look and see if they a community collaboration coming any time soon. Go be a part of something! It’s only scary for a bit!