Retronator

Golden Horn

Thu, 07 May 2026 02:14:59 -0700

Golden Horn

It’s been a year since I’ve come back from my world trip, when I painted a bit more than usual. These days, I mostly create art for my game Pixel Art Academy, as I was a bit uninspired to do personal work. This made me that much more happy when I found myself enjoying painting this beach, on a short trip to the Croatian seaside at the end of April. I hope you will enjoy the 90s vibes!

Independent Games Festival 2026

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 12:08:21 -0700

It’s GDC week—the time when a disproportionate amount of game developers migrate to San Francisco for what was previously known as the Game Developers Conference. Due to an apparent early midlife crisis, however (it has been going on for 37 years after all), the conference is now known as GDC Festival of Gaming.

Either way, like every year since 1999, Wednesday night brought with it the Independent Games Festival, an awards ceremony and celebration of the most indie of independent games. Which is pretty cool, because we now get to look at all the finalists that are done in pixel art(ish) styles and post them in this just-as-much-midlife-crisiing pixel art blog. Maybe you’ll even find a new game or two to get excited about!

To make it even more fun, I’ll include as many screenshots as each game got nominations for, starting with the absolute IGF winner …

Titanium Court

Seumas McNally Grand Prize (winner)
Excellence in Design (winner)
Nuovo Award
Excellence in Narrative

Perfect Tides: Station to Station

Excellence in Narrative (winner)
Seumas McNally Grand Prize

Morsels

Excellence In Visual Art
Excellence In Audio

Loco Motive

Excellence In Visual Art

Öoo

Excellence in Design

Time Flies

Excellence in Design

Yes, Your Grace 2: Snowfall

Wings Award

BALL x PIT

Excellence In Audio

SPRKLS.exe

Best Student Game

Make sure to click the titles of the games that caught your interest to get to their nomination pages and learn more about them. Maybe even give them a go? They’re all on Steam after all (although not all are released yet).

And if you’re intrigued by the whole event, you can watch the recording right here:

First Sun

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 03:04:00 -0700

First Sun

Inspired by my trip to the north of Sweden, beyond the polar circle. After a week of enjoying auroras in the sky with no sun in sight, on the day of our return, sunshine peeked out of the mountains and it felt like a warm hug of a friend you haven’t seen in a long time.

In the sea of tutorials called “How to draw X” where X can be very specific thing such as “gems” or…

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 00:40:52 -0800

In the sea of tutorials called “How to draw X” where X can be very specific thing such as “gems” or “produce”, it’s nice to see the other end of the spectrum where you go as bold as explaining how to draw “anything”.

What is great about Saultoons’ tutorial How To Draw Anything… is that it highlights an important point: you don’t need a specific tutorial to figure out how to draw something. If you know your basic elements of art (line, shape, form, space) and the fundamentals deriving from them (perspective, anatomy), you can indeed draw anything, especially with a reference to know the subject’s 3D shape and materials.

(Also, don’t get me wrong, Saint11 and Slynyrd have done plenty of tutorials explaining fundamentals and overarching concepts, so it took them a while before they came down to the nitty-gritty of individual subjects. Plus, it’s nice to see how they apply their techniques to specific examples. It’s nice to have the whole range covered.)

It’s not too often I get to write about a new old-school tool for making lo-fi graphics. Both…

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 01:30:14 -0800

It’s not too often I get to write about a new old-school tool for making lo-fi graphics. Both because I haven’t written a news article in ages (sorry!), but also since everything today is either a mobile app, a cloud service, or powered by generative AI. Who am I kidding, it’s all 3 at once!

Lester, developed by Ruben Tous, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, is a classic, offline program that fills you with nostalgia just as much as the beloved animation technique it’s built for. And I’m not just saying that because it has the ZX Spectrum palette built in!

The algorithms packed in the tool speed up production significantly as all you have to do is click on the areas of the input video you want to create clusters for and it can propagate them to all future frames. The magic is all open-sourced and described in Ruben’s research article Rotoscope Animation through Video Object Segmentation and Tracking.

It takes a bunch of time to process the frames and the results aren’t (always) perfect, but I’d rather get some extra work done while it’s silently purring in the background and then clean up the base animation than manually color over each individual frame myself.

Good luck getting these 167 frames done by hand (although I do miss all the TV shows I managed to watch when doing repetitive tasks like that).

If you’d like to add Lester to your own toolchain and stand next to classics such as Prince of Persia and Another World, get it here (free, macOS/Windows).

Clouds practice #3

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 22:08:35 -0800

Clouds practice #3

I did two studies of clouds all the way back in March and April 2018. Now that I’ve been looking at all the amazing skies during sunsets in Tahiti, I had to get back to it.

This time it’s painted from my own reference with colors mostly picked plein air at a different sunset with similar conditions (Atari 2600 palette, as always).

California Sunset

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 13:20:14 -0800

California Sunset

First artwork of 2025. I tried to retain the expressiveness of my pixel paintings but also clean it up and make the clusters at the edges reminiscent of impressionistic painting where there are abstract blobs of color that slowly get representational towards the center.

Last week was crazy full of pixel art titles so it’s time for another Pixel Art News!

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 12:01:09 -0700

Last week was crazy full of pixel art titles so it’s time for another Pixel Art News!

Featuring:
🔪 RetroRealms
💾 Saveseeker
🌆 Devil’s Hideout
⛏️ Odd Realm
🛡️ Knights of the Road
🏹 Arco
💎 The Crimson Diamond
🏝️ Castaway
🥕 Gourdlets
💖 Wholesome Games Steam Celebration
🎨 Pixelorama

After the exceptionally long PixElated Festival episode we’re back with a more chill look at the…

Mon, 12 Aug 2024 00:55:03 -0700

After the exceptionally long PixElated Festival episode we’re back with a more chill look at the upcoming and newly released pixel art games (lots of cozy stuff in there this time).

9 years ago (minus 2 days), I posted this image to announce the launch of my Kickstarter for a game…

Sat, 03 Aug 2024 01:21:22 -0700

9 years ago (minus 2 days), I posted this image to announce the launch of my Kickstarter for a game called Pixel Art Academy, an adventure where you would become an art student and learn how to draw.

While the path hasn’t led all the way to the city of Retropolis yet, 2 days from now, on the 9th anniversary of the Kickstarter launch, the game’s Learn Mode will launch into Early Access on Steam. It’s a smaller version of the full game I imagined, but the good part is that you will be able to start learning with it straight away.

Check the trailer below and wishlist on Steam to be notified when it launches on August 5.

My big coverage of the PixElated Festival is here!

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 07:11:17 -0700

My big coverage of the PixElated Festival is here!

See which games impressed me the most with their art style and then go find your own favorites on the Steam sale page.

This has been amazing and nerve-wracking to watch! Luckily, the game didn’t break and only one…

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 22:41:59 -0700

6vcr:

my friend made a game about learning pixel art that will go into early access this August! I want to check it out on stream! let’s play, chill and chat 🐸

This has been amazing and nerve-wracking to watch! Luckily, the game didn’t break and only one tutorial lesson was really bad (as I already knew), so I think it was a success?

9 days till release …

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 23:59:29 -0700

9 days till release …

I hope you will enjoy doing pixel art in my cozy pixel art game.

Wishlist here.

This is it! I can officially announce that my game Pixel Art Academy: Learn Mode will launch into…

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 06:31:16 -0700

This is it! I can officially announce that my game Pixel Art Academy: Learn Mode will launch into Steam Early Access on August 5!

It’ll be the 9th anniversary of the Pixel Art Academy Kickstarter that day and about 1.5 years since I decided to take the educational core of my adventure game and release it as a standalone, downloadable Learn Mode that focuses just on the educational parts without the story elements.

The reception of Learn Mode has been great so far and people seem to enjoy learning digital drawing and pixel art fundamentals through a video game. Whew! I’m far from done though, but the first chapter focusing on lines will be getting released now before I finish the other 6 out of 7 elements of art throughout Early Access.

Here’s the release date announcement trailer and don’t forget to wishlist the game—or play the demo—on Steam if it looks interesting to you!

Guess what, Pixel Art News is back! … For the Summer.

Sun, 30 Jun 2024 23:47:23 -0700

Guess what, Pixel Art News is back! … For the Summer.

Those of you who have been around the block for a while now—in particular in 2017—will remember my monthly YouTube show where I covered upcoming and newly released games along with random pixel art bits and pieces and a DIY section.

I’m not committing to reviving it, but I will create a few episodes this Summer, calling it #SummerOfPixelArt (it’s not really a thing, I just made it up). On the plus side, I record it weekly now on Twitch and you can even catch individual news as shorts on places like TikTok and Instagram.

In the latest episode, among other things, I give recommendations of important pixel art games for their art direction + they are 50% off or cheaper on Steam Summer Sale. This includes tumblr folks such as @dpadstudio, @thimbleweedpark, @danfessler, and @johanvinet!

I’ve done 4 episodes so far, here are the other 3 you have missed if you don’t follow me on YouTube, X, or Facebook where I also upload them.

Also, here is the episode cover again, featuring key art from Pathway, as otherwise this post won’t appear on my front page. Whoops!

When I was watching the trailer for Arco at Summer Game Fest, I thought to myself, those trees sure…

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 01:30:28 -0700

When I was watching the trailer for Arco at Summer Game Fest, I thought to myself, those trees sure look like something Franek would draw. Sure enough, the environment artist from Kingdom: Norse Lands is indeed one of the 4 developers behind this story-rich tactical turn-based RPG, mesmerizing us with breathtaking scenes of grandiosity.

I played the demo on Steam (macOS, Windows) and enjoyed the unique fighting system, a blend of turns and active pause. You plan your moves based on telegraphed actions and watch the turn play out in real-time. As for the full game—potentially coming out this year—I’m looking forward to experience the Tarantino-esque intertwining of the “3 tales forged in bloodshed, laced with magic, and united by revenge.”

Noah Cai, better known as Pixel Architect on YouTube, has been posting inspiring devlogs of Chef RPG…

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 11:47:09 -0700

Noah Cai, better known as Pixel Architect on YouTube, has been posting inspiring devlogs of Chef RPG to his channel for almost 4 years now. As a former architectural designer, he brings a specialized set of processes to his ever-improving pixel art skills.

Chef RPG is clearly inspired by Stardew Valley, expanding it with many activities such as hunting and cooking mini-games as you manage your very own restaurant in a quaint, seaside town.

We just received a new trailer for the game along with a September 12 release date (Early Access). You can wishlist the game on its Steam page.

It’s been a hot minute, I should really spend more time back here.

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 05:09:06 -0700

It’s been a hot minute, I should really spend more time back here.

(Saying it today so if I fail, it’s a (bad) joke. 😬)

In the meantime, here’s some fan art I recently made.

…

Reflecting on it a bit more, I think I put my bar up quite high for what to post since everything appears on the front page as a newspaper article. But I really want to post more just casually. Maybe not everything needs to be a proper article/review/whatever. More like back in 2010 when this whole blog started.

The art of Wargroove 2 is wonderful! Chucklefish’s second original IP (after Starbound) finally got…

Thu, 05 Oct 2023 04:05:00 -0700

The art of Wargroove 2 is wonderful! Chucklefish’s second original IP (after Starbound) finally got a sequel today and oh, it’s a lovely world to dive into. Instead of being developed in-house as the original, the second installment of the tactical turn-based strategy is brought to us by one of my favorite studios, Robotality, whose shading-bending game Pathway was previously published by Chucklefish.

The collaboration between the two developers clearly paid off as Wargroove 2 gets the trademark mood lighting of Robotality’s art director Simon Bachman on top of the original Wargroove cuteness. The shading is not as crazy as Pathway’s fully dynamic engine—instead, Wargroove 2 enhances the visuals of the Halley engine with subtler animated halos around characters, both in-game and in the many story cutscenes.

The game stays smartly close to the original by keeping everything you loved while introducing more content, more factions, more units, more strategy, more everything! As a big fan of Advance Wars back in the day, I had a great time, but there are plenty of other 9/10 reviews that can more sufficiently speak of Wargroove 2’s gameplay goodness.

If you’re up for some cozy turn-based tactics (as cozy and wholesome as a war-themed game can be), you can get the game on Steam ($20, Windows only) or Switch.

Lily pads

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 07:37:52 -0700

Lily pads

Starting a new series of paintings called Sweden (since they’ll be landscapes from around Spelkollektivet where I live now).

Mostly done with Pixquare—the iPad app I reviewed a few posts back—plus some Aseprite and Blender for heavy lifting on the reflections.