How to Design a Game Around Pixel Art

Usually pixel art in video games defines one of two things about a game. The overarching ascetic of the game, displaying it as a throwback to the days of the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) and Genesis.Examples of games like these are Shovel Knight or Stardew Valley. Or, it establishes that the game is underfunded and that it can't fund its art department effectively (games like this are either starting projects or extremely heavy on game play or other aspects of the game).

However pixel art is rarely used as a pillar of game play, While it is used in 2-D games the game play usually remains unchanged from a pieces of similar design but different art. I think it would be a brilliant idea to incorporate pixel art as an aspect of the design.

To begin thinking about how pixel art could be applied to game play we have to understand what it brings to the table. Namely simplicity and 2-D landscaping. Simplicity in its inability to show great detail and its speed in being drawn. secondly pixel art is used for 2-D games. From this there are two choices that immediately comes to mind for incorporating game design with this art form.

Firstly we could use pixel art for drawing, probably not as a focal point of the game but for example in a magic fantasy game where you play as a wizard in training you could use pixel art to write runes that are quite basic alone but when combined to make entirely new complex spells, were still recognizable. For example if you had a fire rune, force rune and time rune, and wanted to make a spell that blew up and knocked everything back after a certain amount of time you could combine the individual runes on a single page into a format that was complex, but instantly and consistently recognizable by the computer as it tried to fit in a spell format.

A second way it we could use pixel are is to change perspectives. Several games in the past have made perspective a big part of game play, like Paper Mario and Titan Fall to name a few. Namely switching from standard to pixel would allow for a change in 3-D to 2-D the reason changing the image to pixelated would work so well is that pixels are already heavily associated with 2-D games. This idea has already been explored in a few puzzle and platform games but what if it was put into a different context, like an TBS (Turn Based Strategy) game where you had to switch from overhead views with general battle controls to a more direct 2-D skirmish phase with simplified terrain and units. Well now I'm invested in this idea as well, originally i just wanted to prove my point with two ideas but i really like this so lets go into detail. So imagine Fire Emblem, with its over world and all that but when you send Sir Darius the XIV on top of a hill to duel with the evil Duke Charles of Mt. Vensinu inside a dark forest instead of a cut and dry animation of a knight character attacking a duelist character. We went into a minor battle that lasted until one was killed or one retreated. In said battle the characters would start one their respective terrain and gain bonuses from not only their character stats but also from the game play aspect of working with higher ground. The battle would by simple and short as we wouldn't want to completely slow down the game play but it would still add a bit more skill into the mix.