Leaning Into Weakness

Slightly misleading title ahoy!

As part of my game development, I am finding myself needing to learn a good many new skills. In particular, creating pixel art has been an interesting challenge. It is definitely a skill I could be good at with a lot of practice, but I am simply not there yet.

Right now, my pixel art is... definitely amateurish. I have little confidence in my ability to color or especially to shade. This is not aided by my colorblindness. But I want my game to look good (and I cannot afford to pay a pixel artist a wage they deserve while I myself am making retail wages). So... what to do?

My solution is to simply... accept that my pixel art will not be that technically advanced. And there is nothing wrong with that. There are plenty of pixel art games with simplistic or even no shading that nevertheless look fantastic. Just look at Deltarune!

Literally nothing about my game needs to be perfect. Honestly, this is true of all art. Perfection is a statement that I find to be rather anti-human, so why should I be pursuing it? Accepting and even leaning into my weaknesses means making my creations more uniquely "me".

But I don't need to solely lean into my weaknesses. I have strengths that can be utilized as well. For example, I am a math nerd. I spent some time in February studying the mathematics of the motion of the sun and moon across the sky, not just the equations themselves but also how they are derived. I also am a rather large fan of normal mapping techniques for video game lighting.

So... why not make normal maps for my sprites?

Let math do the shading for me, and make it dynamic with time of day.

I don't need to have technically advanced pixel art. I can utilize my strengths to compensate for my weaknesses, and in doing so create a style that is probably going to be fairly unique.

Anyways I now have a fairly thorough understanding of normal maps and an algorithm for how I want to make them. I also have the equations on-hand (but not yet implemented) for dynamic lighting in a 2D pixel art environment. This is going to be fun!