Hi there! welcome to the first of our little 'Behind the Scenes' blog posts. Today, we are going to run you through a small snippet of art from Mystic Veil: What it is, how we made it and a few tips for making something like it yourself. 

Our first post is: Pixel Art.

Our game contains multiple different UI elements. We use them to represent the player's health, as well as the current element the player is holding to cast a spell.

Here is an example from the game, shown below.

Behind the helm on the Pixel work is our talented 2d artist, William. While he is a man of few words, we did make sure to get a single nugget of wisdom out of him:

"uhhhm....you'll probably not get it right the first try"

As so elequently put by Will, his work went through several iterations before getting to exactly what we thought would be best in the game. Using the program "Aesprite", William made several versions of his work, organised neatly so that we look through each one. 

His first draft. Some great work, but not exactly what we wanted. So, William kept on with his other versions, using those culored lines on the right as a guide for making all of his designs level and centered.

then he sent us this one

and this one

...and this one...all in about 1 day. Say what you want about Will, his work ethic definitely isn't lacking.

While working, William was extra smart, making sure to keep each sample seperate, along with each bar section, along with each color, ending with a maticulous little layer bar that looked like this by the end.

So as far as advice goes, for any form of 2d art you make, PLEASE for your own safety, make sure to keep your layers tidy. There is nothing more painful that drawing one thing on 4 different layers, and having to find the correct one to erase something on. 
And like will said, it's not likely you'll create something perfect on the first try, so keep it saved and work off of it. It's always better to build off of something than scrap it and try again. 

Well, that was us for this week. Thank you to William for sharing his knowledge, and thank you, the audience, for reading.