In our last post, we talked a little about W&W’s origins. Today, I’ll post a little bit on how the graphics were created for Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles!

As we all know, the resolution of the GP2X is 320*240 pixels, and though it may sound like a very limited resolution by today’s standards, it houses no less than 76800 dots of pure workload. The reason is that sprite graphics have dots hand placed carefully to make everything look pretty and well animated.

For the graphics, as always, everything goes by the “rule of eights” with me. I already knew that the “Elements” in the game would be 16×16, so all I needed was to make them colorful and to include the appropriate Chinese character inside. Chinese characters are pretty complicated compared to letters in say, English, and sometimes squeezing the whole ideogram in a limited space can be quite a challenge!

At first, they were going to be more “classic” in style. The characters were more calligraphic and the blocks much flatter. Later, I imagined them as cubes, so I had to play with the lighting to give them volume. I wanted the blocks to fade according to the element they represented, so I drew the bursting animations.

We refer to the traditional pixel graphics that compose many of the elements in 2D games, such as Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles, as sprites. Sorry, no soft drinks!

(If you order Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles you can choose to have a custom W&W style sprite character based on you! You just need to send us a picture of yourself!)

What’s so special about a sprite?

A sprite requires the unusual skill to be able to draw using little squares with resolution and color restrictions. Sadly, this skill is deteriorating greatly in the West, and there are very few people who can still produce high quality pixel art there. The recently released Contra 4 and upcoming Noitu Love 2 by Joakim Sandberg are excellent examples (so be sure to support projects like these if you love this art)!