Game progress - 29/10/25

Today I worked a bit more on my Asuka sprite. I am not good at pixel art (or any art), but I am trying to learn. I should be way more serious about this: I barely watch any tutorials, and I often end up copying existing pixel art.

However, this time I couldn't find a good Asuka pixel art, so I downloaded an image, uploaded it to a website that converts pics into pixel art, and tried to learn from the newly generated pics. Those pics were 128x128 pixels, which means they wouldn't be suitable for the GBA (unless I uploaded them as a background, I suppose).

But since I was mostly copying, I felt like I was passively learning rather than actively creating. Still, every step counts. I feel somewhat incompetent; I couldn’t have figured this out on my own.

When it comes to art, one of my main issues is proportions, and pixel art can sometimes help with that (thanks to pixels).
However, especially when you have limited pixels, it’s hard to manage the available space and highlight the smallest details.

The images I downloaded showed me something important: shading is truly crucial in pixel art. Indeed, the amount of details and “fullness” that different colours give is impressive: it solves the issue of having a limited space to draw.

Diving into the practical aspect, the shading on the Asuka images was way too hard for me to reproduce, or even just understand in the first place.

Considering that I work on every aspect of a GBA game, I surely need to take into account that more colours mean a bigger colour palette, and the art could be great, but that also means that I need to handle resources well.

In this case, I am pretty sure there are no issues with bigger palettes, but still, it’s a good thing to consider.

There’s another thing I noticed: the sides of the face aren’t symmetrical. This could change with the shading, but I find it interesting that the face looks normal when I look at it, when, in reality, there are some minor differences.

What I did today was: referencing the downloaded pictures and drawing a proportion of 4 of the main parts of Asuka’s sprite: shoulders, neck, face, and hair. I did some quick calculations, and I got something like: 5, 6, 11, 10 pixels respectively.

There’s some overlap between face and hair, but it’s still a good reference. I copied the basic pixel outlines and reproduced them on my 32x32 pixel sprite table.

Here it is: image vs the general outline I made

There’s still a lot to do, and I purposely haven’t done shading yet. I can already see a couple of things I would change, like the hair in the face spot, which I would make a bit shorter, and the shoulders, which were bigger in the beginning, and I left them like this because it’s an easy fix: I really just have to delete some pixels from both extremities.

Apparently, you can upload sprites of any dimensions (according to the GBA hardware rules, so 8x8, 16x16, etc.), and then you can change the dimensions to your liking. This could really be game-changing (yeah, it’s basically a joke lol) because it would mean that I could make 64x64 pixel sprites fit in smaller spaces (32x32, for example). I imagine this to be a bit heavy on the GBA hardware, but in my case, that’s not an issue at all. Indeed, this would be applied only to 1 sprite on screen.

So, this means that I might have to start from scratch again...