square one
the idea for spellbound was born years ago now, in 2021. at the time it was just an idea, i made some character designs and some concept art. eventually i made my first sprite from an old character of mine named hazel.
my first sprite definitely looked rough! i really struggled with pixel art at first, it certainly has a learning curve of its own. each pixel makes a difference when you are working on such a small scale. eventually i improved the sprites, which you can see here if you’re interested in her progression.
sprites are only a small part of what i do as the game’s only artist. what takes up the majority of my time is the tilesets, which are all the little pieces i fit together to make levels and maps! think of any grid or tile-based game you’ve played and imagine each tile as its own piece of art. instead of making the level as a whole, you create the individual tiles and fit them together!
it didn’t always look like this of course. around the end of 2022, i remade my sprite for hazel and after noticing a marked improvement, i decided it was time to update my tilesets. for a long time i struggled with the cliffs. when you make tilesets, it’s important that all the little pieces fit together right. sometimes, you need to make tessellating patterns and that can be really tricky. my first tileset appeared very flat, but i had severely overcomplicated making the cliffs. it didn’t need to be a “tile” with a repeating pattern, per se. for my second tileset i just opted for rocks that i could layer on top of each other!
it was a very big and time consuming decision to make but it really paid off in the end! being honest with myself, this probably won’t even be the final version by the time we have a playable game. the more assets i create, the more my skill improves; so i often find myself going back to improve things i’ve already made 1, 2, or 3+ times!!
at this point, we’ve got the building blocks to make some levels so now the focus will be creating some characters that can walk and talk. you wouldn’t believe all the work that goes into animation. i’ll have to make a rant/blog post about that soon.