In my attempts to learn game development I thought I better give pixel art a go.
I used the AMAZING web app Piskel for my first efforts. As a non-artist and knowing nothing about pixel art before starting, I found Piskel to be the perfect place to start. Check it out here
Piskel
Piskel is an online pixel art creation tool. It has an amazing selection of tools and options to get you up and running creating your first pixel art attempts quickly and intuitively. While I am defintely NOT an expert, I found I could get something together pretty quickly.
You get the usual sort of tools that you would expect from a simple drawing package; line tools, shape tools, selections etc. Though Piskel really came in to its own for me though in its layers and frames.
In each frame you can set layers as you would in other drawing programs. I found this to be massively useful when atempting to animate my pixel art. Once you are happy with a frame and ready to create a new one you have a few options to speed up the process. You can clone a previous frame, flip it, crop it etc. These might not seem impressive to someone who knows what they are taling about but I found them massively helpful.
My first attempts
As I’m sure I’ve said already, I am not an artist, so unsurprisingly my first attempts were not the most successful.
I was trying to make a character for a game I’m working on and I think I may have started out a little too ambitiously.
However, it is so quick and easy to start and make a new project in Piskel it really doesn’t matter if you are rubbish like me.
Animation
For me, the thing that makes Piskel stand out so much was the built in animation tools.
You have the ability to create frames to build up animation which is great. But Piskel will also preview the animation for you automatically. You can even set the number of frames per second in your preview.
I found these tools to be very helpful to keep my designs on track so I didn’t have to keep exporting them and turning them in to animations within Unity.
Once you are happy with your animation you can then export it in various formats such as a GIF or as a sprite sheet. Since I was importing mine in to Unity I went with the sprite sheet option. On importing in to Unity I found no problems at all.
I’ll do another post about how to use the sprite sheet in unity another time.
Amazing
I can’t recommend Piskel enough. For someone totally new to pixel art like me, it was really daunting on how to go about getting started. However Piskel’s easy to use interface let me concentrate on trying to make something cool rather than learning a new piece of software.
Go try it!