Hey everyone! Simon here, Art Director at Robotality. What a ride the last few months were. We released over a dozen of updates, including one big update called Adventurers Wanted that reworked the core gameplay using your feedback you gave us. We feel honored to have such a nice and supportive community. Thank you! As you have seen now the Steam Autumn Sale is live and as with every year, you can now also vote for the games you love to nominate for a Steam Awards. Lets see if we can get a game with pixel art into the Outstanding Visual Style category together What makes the art style of Pathway so special? The visual art style of Pathway was a pipe dream of mine I had long before we even started working on the game. During the development of our first game, Halfway we had our first experiments going with the ideas to combine classical pixel art with dynamic lights and shadows, but due to time constraints we never followed through. After we finished Halfway we started to look into what to do next, and while we worked on the game design for Pathway, we also picked up the old idea again: Can we actually do proper shadows and dynamic light within a pixel art game that are also as close as possible pixel perfect. No one before us had fully done this so it was an interesting challenge to take up. There are some other games that uses dynamic lighting and normal maps combined with pixel art, but no one did a full dynamic light and shadow setup until now! After a few months of prototyping we actually had a proof of concept for this:
As you can see, it looked more like Halfway and our concept for Pathway was not even close to the finished product we have now. But... we now knew that it could be done! Little did we know back then, that it would take us another 4 years to complete and for Pathway to become the game it is now. Here are some more very old prototype screenshots of the Pathway tech:
Even though the game does not look like it in the end, we are using a very limited color palette for the whole game. All assets are made out of a set of 32 colors for the environment and another 32 colors for the character. Here you can see the rough sketches I did to test my 32 colors for the environment back in early 2016:
Next up is a short behind-the-scenes video of how we create our levels and visuals in our custom editor. To achieve the look, we actually use voxels and 3D meshes to generate the scenes and instead of pixels - you see colorized polygons for each pixel on the screen. https://youtu.be/sHYhSnl7cZo If you think the result is worth an award nomination on Steam feel free to click on the widget above. Thank you again for the support, its been a cool ride together. We are looking forward to sharing more news with you folks soon about what we have in store with Pathway. PS: If you want to have a more detailed look at what we did to achieve the look we have. Let us know in the comments and we will see what we can do.