Thanks for the positive feedback on this!

I'd like to clarify that I'm not really trying to get all that close to Flashback, the title says it as a joke (heck, I haven't even finished the game) - I was studying its style (or rather, Helms work from years ago) not to recreate it or really try and capture the feeling, I was doing it to become a better pixel artist. This may sound obvious but maybe I haven't made that clear before! As long as it's nice and people like it, I could give a rat's ass about whether it feels like Flashback or not!

I will work over the player character, Helm, no worries. Haven't started working on him at all (apart from trying out giving him those shades, that is) - the way I do these things is start out with a non-shaded version, then I work out the frames for the main animations (including idleing [breathing for example], running, walking, jumping etc.) and THEN I'll refine the shading. This usually shifts the focus from the single sprites to the animations, somewhat like Metal Slug does it, hopefully resulting in fluid animations rather than extremely well worked out single frames. Of course, for those frames that the player will be looking at un- or barely animated for a longer time, I'll actually make sure these look adequate (such as the standing frame).

More wall stuff (segmentations) is planned, I will draw the tiles in-game (if it ever comes to this) in three layers, one background (for the walls and everything far in the back), the object layer (which is still drawn behind the player, but in front of the walls [for the rails that are further away for example]) and the foreground stuff (which will be drawn in front of the player [for the rails in front of the player, the "front" parts of the gates etc.]). I was just too lazy to work these segmentations into more parts of the mock-up because I work with Pro Motion which doesn't support layers and I'd have to shift a lot of pixels.

I will work on the bar colors some more, I agree they're not perfect yet, thanks for the input there!

Dex: This is intended as a mock-up, not a stand-alone pixel art piece/scene. The enemies are all standing around there but they will be animated in the game, just don't have them that far yet. Hope this makes sense!

Trevorius: Well, for the moment this is just a study and I'm trying to improve my pixel art skills, if I ever get a chance (time-wise) to produce a game in the nearer future, then I'll worry about the rest, I guess.

Anyways...


Minor updates, fixed the monitor, changed the vertical lift bar colors, realized the bright specular highlights on the foreground monitors, boxes etc. were too contrasty and fixed that and tried to tweak the brightish blue color.

Going in the right direction, still?

EDIT: another minor update, some more pixels, mostly worked on the colors though:

Yep, Flashback is just a game with very good graphics for me (and very good animations and very unintuitive controls - at least when playing on an emulator). I don't think studying and recreating its style is more difficult than the other games that have been mentioned or Metal Slug for example or whatever. It's just hard because the originals were so damn good.

Anyways, have changed the shadow - I was kinda confused with the horizontal position of the light source, but Helm makes a very valid point and - last but not least - that's the way Flashback has its shadows too.

New version features nothing groundbreaking, I've just been pushing a few more pixels around:


Let me know what you think please.

New version is up, I fixed the perspective (thanks for pointing that out, can't believe I didn't see that before), added more details and made the player's arms one pixel longer. I think it makes a great difference already, thanks a lot for the advice and the edit!

Anything else? Again, everybody is invited to comment, I'm sure a 'community' effort/discussion is more productive than an ABAB chain of replies (no matter how valuable and appreciated your input is in this case, Helm).

No, I'm not gonna try it, just kidding.

In fact I was referencing a piece by Helm that I found on pixeljoint. Take a look here.

I instantly liked the style and the - as he says - somewhat bland palette and tried to design some assets that would fit.


This was only done as a practice and I hope I don't break any rules by doing this study of style or however you want to call it. Some of the pixels in the image above (namely, the blue pipes in the background, the fan block thingie on the celing and large parts of the general design of the big gray gates - the palette as well) are taken from Helm's work, I'm not trying to call them my own or anything - they are in there as to capture the style. If there are objections, I will delete the thread.

I do think there is enough own material in there to allow some general pointers as to where I should improve though, and that's exactly what I want. 

Also, here is a running animation for the player character, six frames (I realize eight would probably look smoother, working on it):



Also note that it's all designed to work at fullscreen!