HEXdidn't... - A Pixel Art Odyssey

One thing common to the SAM Coupé games I've thusfar been involved with is a certain... haphazard quality to the development. My experience with 'professional' game development is admittedly limited (high school Work Experience and one published game more than 30 years ago, working by phone/post with a freelance coder), but it's easy enough to see when things are happening (or not happening) because something hasn't been fully thought through or discussed with all parties involved. Something I've been guilty of in the past is raising a hypothetical, then driving ahead with designing sprites, etc. based around that hypothetical , without having first adequately confirmed that it would ever be anything but hypothetical. For example, I mentioned in my first post about the sprites in The Lower Caverns , that I produced about 2/3 of a screen's worth of new and unique sprites before the coder pointed out that all he'd really wanted was for the existing sprite...

Thirty-odd posts in, it may not yet be clear why I've named this blog "A Pixel Art Odyssey ". After all, the word 'odyssey' normally implies a long, meandering journey beset by hardship , taken from the poem by Homer. It doesn't seem to be entirely applicable to the act of creating low-res sprites for games on the Spectrum or the SAM Coupé... But there are several reasons for that very deliberate choice. First and foremost, having started out in pixel art by drawing on paper (and I really must get round to posting some examples of my earliest work), I'm still not entirely comfortable creating pixel art directly on a computer, using a mouse, or any other input device. While I techncially now have over 35 years of experience in pixel art, there was quite a significant gap between my early efforts and my current period of work in that field, during which I wasn't really doing much due to full-time work commitments. That lack of practice meant that I almos...