Although I have decades of drawing experience, I have never been an art teacher ( unless you count classes and workshops of filmmaking ) and, more importantly, I like imperfect stuff and breaking rules so, therefore I am not the 'right' teacher for a lot of people ( more like a rebellious source of inspiration ).
I asked myself this question today:
How to draw a pixel art monster?
I penned down those words in one of my many notebooks, while I was sitting at the river beach. The plan was to focus on my 'The Monster of Disco' project from a different angle.
Before I headed out, I had double checked on https://make.bitsy.org/
an awesome gamemaking tool that anyone and their grandmother can use
what the maximum pixel size is for the avatars in there ( or, in fact, for any kind of block: avatar, tile, sprite, item ) and discovered that it was 8 by 8 pixels.
So, I started trying to draw monsters smaller than that, which appeared to be quite the challenge.
It made me think more in close ups or fragments of monsters ( like their face or hand/ paw/ claw ).
Talking about claws...
I realized that I could have made both images look the same with two different names, as it's up to your imagination what you see in it.
A couple of hours later, the claw ended up in my first attempt at gamifying 'The Monster of Disco'.
The GIF at the top of this post shows 'the claw', symbolizing ( the monster of ) fear, as well as a dancing 'Monster of Disco' and a pole.
The pole refers to previous Monster of Disco pole dancing posts. If you have read those you might remember that
pole dancing was whole dancing, unlike break dancing...
Remember this beauty? ;<)
from Break Dancing vs Pole Dancing
There's not much logic to the game, as of yet.
I was basically having fun.
I also realized that I should not have made the claw the avatar, as it's the only character that the player can move around with
haha!
Then again, fear is a pretty big actor in the lives of many of us ( including mine ) but - in my opinion - bigger than it should be, so I will change this around ( soon ) and make the Monster of Disco the avatar/ main character and not just a mere sprite/ non playable character.
A Little backstory:
You might have heard ( or likely have missed ) that, three months ago, I started on attempting to turn my Hypersensitivosaurus stories/ books into a pixel art game or, mayhaps, design some sort of gamified website/ website in the form of a pixelart minigame to promote my stories/ books.
I stopped working on that, lost interest and got sidetracked by my new project that came to me a month ago.
Today I was reminded of that and I felt like getting back into Bitsy gamemaking, once again. Let's say that I felt like seeing what would happen if I tried to transmorph The Monster of Disco into a (Bitsy) game.
I also had a little bit of fun with chiptunes music making
The result of today's all-play-and-no-work can be found here:
https://vincent-nijman.itch.io/the-monster-of-disco
I won't promise to update this ( often ) that's just now how my creative mind works but I'll see if I can, if I am indeed feeling it ;<)
Monster hug!