Dan Fessler
@DanFessler
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Co-founder & Chief Creative Officer at @incite_dev Prev. Chief Visual Officer at @CoreGames Pixel art enthusiast & web dev hobbyist
Pacifica, CA
Joined October 2008
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It's not even funny how true this is
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It needed a little animation
You guys seemed to like the 2.5D style, so I made another one
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finished 3D-ifying the bed.
I guess you could call this a test bed *bdumm tshh*
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You guys seemed to like the 2.5D style, so I made another one
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Was super inspired by
@chickysprout
's iso building and wanted to see how it'd feel with some perspective. Would love to play a game with this aesthetic.
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Are you a 2D illustrator or a junior 3D artist looking for work? Think you can replicate the process in the video below? I'd love to chat with you!
Many of you have asked about how we achieve our 2.5D art style.
Here's our process, step-by-step.
Shout out to
@DanFessler
our Chief Creative Officer for recording this clip.
#digitalillustration
#gameart
#gamedev
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Hey
@PLAYERUNKNOWN
I know you're trying to have fun for April fools, but this is really messed up.
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turns out index painting in photoshop with Lazy Nesumi is great for pixeling detailed isometric scenes
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Made an old-school palette swapping shader. Can also blend between any two palettes for smooth mood changes
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Gunna share some more Chasm art as I sort through it all.
Day and Night:
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To everyone who was asking about the process, I put together a video tutorial for the car
Many of you have asked about how we achieve our 2.5D art style.
Here's our process, step-by-step.
Shout out to
@DanFessler
our Chief Creative Officer for recording this clip.
#digitalillustration
#gameart
#gamedev
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Pro-tip: 2.5D always looks 100% more impressive if you add a little rotation <3
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And here's what it looks like with parallax. (sorry for the non-perfect loop)
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looking through some old art and found this. Very old, but still like it :)
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We're prototyping the foundation of what will become our emergent narrative engine, so I needed an art style I can quickly iterate with and landed on this sketch style.
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This looks amazing, but PLEASE don't refer to yourself as a solo dev when you clearly worked with contractors. They are part of your team. You are not solo.
Crazy open world sandbox RPG created by a solo developer
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Here's a quick pixel art pro-tip for easy dithering in Photoshop. Set a dither pattern as your brush texture and change the mode to subtract
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This is what I've been hoping to see with a 3d/pixel hybrid game. It's looking great
We've refined a lot of the environment graphics on
#ProjectTerra
! See how wind affects the props on this map. Also new: First test NPC's with anims and climbing ladders!
#gamedev
#pixelart
#indiedev
#ドット絵
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Back with more Chasm art: the Save and Altar rooms.
Save room in particular was my favorite thing to work on and was always fun seeing people's first reaction to it at convention demos.
#pixelart
#IndieGameDev
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Want to see what a full environment built with our 2.5D assets looks?
Here's one we made for "Survive a Night with a Vampire". You're locked in a room with a vampire, try to convince her to let you live.
You can play it now on our UGC platform here:
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We got our vampire's bedroom done just in time for Halloween
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I love how this style makes props like even a simple recycling bin look so delightful. So good!
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Also wanted to shout out
@chickysprout
who's isometric art was a great inspiration to me for this style.
Below is cocefi's art converted to 2.5D
Was super inspired by
@chickysprout
's iso building and wanted to see how it'd feel with some perspective. Would love to play a game with this aesthetic.
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Made myself a photoshop action to fill the alpha transparent areas of our textures with color so I can get rid of those pesky edge ghosting artifacts
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you all seemed to like the bed. Here's a fireplace to add to the vampire-core collection of furniture
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Quick experiment after chatting with
@bengrue
using 3d to tween rotations of a hand-drawn isometric prop
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nothing quite as humbling as creating a mesh for a 2D asset to see how bad you are at drawing iso perspective
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For the past 5 years I've been working on this and on July 31 it finally will see the light of day. I'm proud of the work we did and can't to share it with you. To all my friends, thanks for your support. Help spread the word :)
@ChasmGame
@BitKidGames
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An unfinished mockup from 2012 or so? Quickly threw in some Chasm art in the far Background to make it feel less empty.
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It's been a while since I've properly pixeled something, so here's some sort of tree
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How we make a 2.5D pinball table for Incite, a micro tutorial ;)
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Put together a quick video demonstrating the state of our prototype and emergent narrative in our RP sandbox
#emergentNarrative
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When pixeling it's easy to stick with a color just because it's convenient, so sometimes I start with a hi-res painting to work out the overall mood and palette before pixeling. Here's the Temple process: paint > rough pixel > Final
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This was the first mockup I made when I joined the Chasm team. This version never shipped in the game, but eventually would become the temple I showed earlier.
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I get a lot of comments that this is actually just 3D and not 2.5D, I beg to differ!
This bed is a great example of how simplified the geometry can be and still pull off a great effect.
You can kinda think of it has billboards with more depth ;)
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playing with a high resolution pixel workflow as part of my pixel art rigging tests. Not a bad way to work honestly.
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I've said this before, but this is a good excuse to do it again.
The absolute best people I've worked with in my career consistently were the ones with creative side projects, especially games.
not only is it unethical to impose, but it's also self-defeating.
with all the microsoft news recently i just keep thinking back to this bit in episode 27 of double fine psychodyssey (the excellent making-of documentary for psychonauts 2) where matt booty tries to reassure the team post-acquisition and in the process says all the wrong things
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People often argue about the virtue of visual coding, but for visual things there’s no debate. This gif so clearly shows how inspecting the visual state at each part of the expression is essential to building great shader FX
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Implemented a dolly zoom so I can adjust the camera FOV while maintaining how much of the scene the camera sees.
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You get about 20 degrees of rotation before things start to look broken.
So one of the constraints of this style is you might need to draw multiple views of your objects.
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Quick test of projection mapping to isometric geometry and assembling scenes with tiles/props
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One benefit of separating the lines from fills in-engine is you can do the fun wiggle-line animation effect
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Been writing some notes about how we separate parts for our 2.5D assets.
The basic rule: if you can fit your hand between the parts, separate, otherwise simplify
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Pixeled some tiling rock last night using index painting. roughly an hour and a half for a 128x128. Could probably be pixel-polished for another half hour.
#pixelart
#indexpainting
#indexpainter
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Holy crapper, Photoshop finally has built in brush symmetry!
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Incredible how well this matches the 2d sprite. I can't tell you how difficult this is to do.
had a really difficult time with it but heres an attempt at nidoking
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this is genius. Gradients used with pixel art to portray subtle bounced light while keeping a pure pixel aesthetic. This is why I say pixel art shouldn’t have arbitrary boundaries defining the medium. It’s about the techniques, not the boundaries.
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While I'm mostly known for my pixel environment work, back in the day I did almost exclusively characters. Kinda miss it. This one was from 2008
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Thinking of making a follow-up 2.5D tutorial that covers how we handle rotations of props. seem like something you guys might be interested in?
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alright, I tamed the wires. Which do you prefer?
1. traditional quadratic
2. fixed radius Manhattan
3. variable radius Manhattan
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Are you a character artist that can do this style? I'd love to talk to you.
Looking for character modelers/animators
I've 3D-ified him... and gave him a hat because I was lazy and didn't want to model that hair.
This is a game perspective test to see if it holds up
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Excited to announce I've co-founded a new company to build something I've been dreaming of for nearly a decade; an emergent narrative sandbox.
We're very early, but can't wait to share as we progress. Stay tuned :)
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A lot of our props were starting to look a bit *too* isometric with perfectly straight lines. We're working towards adding a bit more of the illustrator's touch.
These latest props are a great example and add so much more personality
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It's official! Chasm is available now on Steam and PS4/Vita! We put a lot of blood sweat and tears into this thing. We truly hope you enjoy it! Here's the launch trailer
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For April fools, I made a Battle Royale game inside slack. Every round it picks a random rule. If you're inactive for a round, or a message doesn't adhere to the rule, that player is eliminated. Rounds get shorter each time. It was quite a riot
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still going through some old folders. Here's another one I quite like, but never got too far with
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What's a bar without alcohol? These props just came in, and I'm no drinker, but these are just so gorgeous to me.
Art by
@essemeninoae
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And here's a bonus super messy progress gif. It was also the first piece I made for chasm when I joined the team, so a lot of time was spent trying to understand the style established by
@slympixel
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@MekaSkull
super useful for VFX, but also just great for starting large pixel illustrations in general. Here's a fireball I made with the same idea. Also wrote a blog about this process:
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well look at that. one of the most handy pixel art tools is now freeware? super cool. Graphics gale is a super nice light-weight pixel art app. Think of it as a really beefed up MS Paint
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you know exciting times are coming when you start refining the logo one last time. (new on bottom)
@ChasmGame
#indiegame
#pixelart
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You asked for it! How to turn Photoshop into the most powerful pixel art program with HD Index Painting:
http://t.co/14j11SAtgj
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Posted my 2.5D art tutorial to youtube if you want to watch/follow us there.
Planning to post more tutorials like this in the near future
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@Voxels
@howieeday
@chickysprout
Constructed simple geometry with the illustration overlayed so I can align it, projection mapped the result, split up the illustration into parts based on what elements overlap others and filled in the gaps, then finally moved the UV islands to match the new part locations
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one benefit of HD index painting compared to traditional index painting is hard to describe without seeing it. Typically, clusters are static, so any index painting tools can only effect what's there, but with HD, the clusters are driven by HD data and reindex dynamically
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Aiming for our worlds to be more than just a static environment, but a world full of fun interactions that the characters can use in some way.
Anyone up for a game of 2.5D pool?
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Minit inspired me to play around with super minimal art styles. The appeal to me is I could actually make a content-heavy open world game if it's constrained to such a simple style. Can't help myself from pushing the detail though which defeats the point.
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I'm a professional pixel artist. Gatekeeping color count, resolution, and canvas size is stupid.
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My
#1
tip for aspiring artists: Never stick with the first thing you come up with. It’s always boring and unimaginative. You can’t skip it, you kinda have to get the boring stuff out of the way first to free your brain to think more creatively
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The good thing about getting close to release of
@ChasmGame
is we can finally spend some time to add more variations and polish to old areas. Working on some foreground props/tiles now
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the proportions of our characters dictates the proportions of our props, naturally
You'd think it's as simple as just scaling, but really what ends up being the case is things are just a lot more "squatty" and top-heavy.
Conceptually I think of this as lowering the center-line
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I maintain that Michael Vicente (aka Orb) is one of the best pixel artists although technically not being an actual pixel artist. I've never seen someone respect the game camera/resolution with their sculpts as much as him. Mind-blowingly good
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Clever technology to combat ai art training by injecting hidden “corrupted” styles as a sort of watermark
It's a big day.
Glaze, our tool for protecting artists against AI art mimicry, is now available for download/use at
Glaze analyzes your art, and generates a modified version (with barely visible changes). This "cloaked" image disrupts AI mimicry process.
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Making an indie game in 2019
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I've 3D-ified him... and gave him a hat because I was lazy and didn't want to model that hair.
This is a game perspective test to see if it holds up
New proportions on the guy and gal together.
One thing I'm really liking about this is it doesn't require me to make the bodies dimorphic at all and it still holds up.
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Experimenting with photoshop's new Pattern Preview to quickly iterate on tilesets by temporarily cropping the canvas to a tiling section. Saves a ton of time!
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Rotations in 2.5D isn't as straight-forward as 3D, but with just a couple drawn views and some tweening it looks basically seamless.
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Pixel purism is harmful to the medium. Pixel art should be about the result, not the tools you used to get there. Tools don't make great art. Great artists make great art.
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style should always be thoughtfully considered, even for a chess game :P
http://t.co/W0kKjFxopw
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Really overwhelmed with all the job applications and just general positive reception to the art style.
Please be patient, it may take me a couple more days to get through all the applicants.
But holy hell there are so many talented people and I wish I could just hire all of ya
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