Learn by doing
Pixel Art Academy's interactive tutorials are designed for learning by doing. While there will be plenty of nerdy reading, all lessons are immediately followed by drawing what you've learned.
Test your knowledge
Before you move on, you want to make sure you understand what you've been learning. Pixel Art Academy uses formative assessment to identify gaps in knowledge so that you can apply further study and practice to build strong fundamentals.
Become a game artist
You can't be an artist by just copying other people's work. It's time to create your own art! In Pixel Art Academy, you will be working on various projects, most of them creating art for classic games such as snake, invaders, block breaker, and pinball creator.
Play your creations
Immediate feedback is very important. Start up the game and see how your sprites look in context. Then jump back to the canvas and immediately see your changes.
Future development
I've been working on Pixel Art Academy for almost a decade, building the game's engine, writing the story, and narrowing down the learning design. While the bigger adventure game that I have in mind is still far from complete, the game's educational core is ready to be shared with a wider audience. That's why I created Learn Mode, a standalone single-player version that includes just the polished learning content.During the Early Access period, I will create tutorials, challenges, and projects that cover the major pixel art fundamentals (jaggies, dithering, and aliasing), applied to different areas (characters, environments, items). After this first course gets a full release, the development will continue to other areas (drawing from observation, perspective, shading …) as well as integration of the new content into the game's full Adventure Mode.
🕹️ Partial Controller Support
🎮 Full Controller Support
- [0 B]
TL;DR:
Invasion project (a shmup game for PICO-8) unlocks after you complete Shape language.
[/*]Customize the Invasion design document on the Pixeltosh.
[/*]Chronoscope, a magazine with science fiction artworks for inspiration and reference.
[/*]A new dynamic soundtrack song plays in Pixel art fundamentals and Invasion project.
[/*]
After a bunch of theory around designing shapes, it\'s time to put things into practice by drawing sprites for a simple, single-screen shoot em\' up.
It runs on PICO-8, so it\'s not a long project like the Pinball game, but it\'s not as simple as the Snake game either. The extra bit of functionality is that you have the chance to customize the design document for the game.
[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/44592760/76870449c0ce8178dccff9b1336aef9220cfa51b.png\"][/img]
You can change every underlined word in the document
[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/44592760/29dacaf049a75a6ba83d20bf542dad37b53084a5.png\"][/img]
and adjust plenty of numeric properties.
[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/44592760/91033afe544f4cdd72cfe4f6a326a9e2c5732809.png\"][/img]
The main thing is of course still to draw the sprites.
[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/44592760/6a9c32ec4ad0ea8c0233ef6370f007658ed53cc0.png\"][/img]
And you have a new magazine/book available if you choose to design your game with the science fiction theme.
[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/44592760/e21825fb6f04b920c655b272e6bc93b566f66882.png\"][/img]
[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/44592760/d3bd63c257750e7b83bb4c4f8247b162aa0aab94.png\"][/img]
Of course you get to play the game and tweak it until you\'re happy with the gameplay.
[img src=\"https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/44592760/18b78ac21095830ccd5a297c8875ad6e0b911ad6.png\"][/img]
There was also a new song added to the game\'s OST (you can hear it when you don\'t have a cassette tape playing in the Music app) and I\'m so happy with how it turned out. It appears at the end of the devlog as well:
I hope you will have fun coming up with creative ways to change the design. I can make it even more advanced in the future (multiple sprites for invaders, invaders that attack out of formation, rotating and animated sprites) as right now it\'s still quite limited, but of course there\'s a million other things to develop too, so I\'ll get back to new tutorials next.
Cheers!\nRetro
Minimum Setup
- OS: 64-bit Ubuntu 14.04
[ 6357 ]
[ 5876 ]
[ 750 ]
[ 1993 ]
[ 1017 ]
Time left:
356102 days, 3 hours, 1 minutes
Time left:
356102 days, 3 hours, 1 minutes
Time left:
6 days, 11 hours, 1 minutes
Time left:
34 days, 11 hours, 1 minutes
Time left:
37 days, 11 hours, 1 minutes
Time left:
38 days, 11 hours, 1 minutes
Time left:
11 days, 21 hours, 1 minutes
Time left:
0 days, 5 hours, 1 minutes
Time left:
7 days, 5 hours, 1 minutes
Time left:
13 days, 5 hours, 1 minutes
Time left:
14 days, 5 hours, 1 minutes
Time left:
19 days, 5 hours, 1 minutes
Time left:
21 days, 5 hours, 1 minutes
Time left:
25 days, 5 hours, 1 minutes
Time left:
4 days, 18 hours, 16 minutes
Time left:
4 days, 18 hours, 16 minutes
Time left:
4 days, 18 hours, 16 minutes
Time left:
4 days, 18 hours, 16 minutes
Time left:
9 days, 11 hours, 2 minutes
Time left:
9 days, 11 hours, 2 minutes
Time left:
9 days, 11 hours, 2 minutes
Time left:
9 days, 11 hours, 2 minutes
Time left:
11 days, 10 hours, 2 minutes
Time left:
11 days, 10 hours, 2 minutes
Time left:
11 days, 10 hours, 2 minutes
Time left:
11 days, 10 hours, 2 minutes
Time left:
16 days, 17 hours, 12 minutes
Time left:
16 days, 17 hours, 12 minutes
Time left:
16 days, 17 hours, 12 minutes
Time left:
16 days, 17 hours, 12 minutes
