I experimented with some kind of glitch art that has many objects ingame appear as constantly shifting masses or shapes, somewhat inspired by Lucah Born of a Dream and Skelly Selest. Not hand drawn as in Lucah though, instead all art in the game was made from a single sprite (at different sizes and rotations):
That sprite was then used either as building blocks or by using it as a brush in Gimp. The end result looks like this:
The resulting aesthetic was justified ingame by some story bits, explaining that your player character is near dead in a coma. What you see is vague visual information that is feed directly into your brain by your mech computer.
I also made all the vfx and projectiles with this technique.
In previous projects I used a similar effect to create darkness effects, since the engine I'm working with doesn't support true lighting, I find that lead to some interesting visuals and it was great fun to go all out with this for the jam.
In many ways it was easier to create the art this way, since I could just brush down effects and shapes quite quickly. I'm normally work with more conventional pixel art, so not having to care about all the details was quite liberating. I think that freed up a lot of time to be put into gameplay, game feel and additional features.
On the other hand, to keep up the effect, I needed to make multiple frames for all objects, even in situations where they are totally still. That created some additional work overall. I wanted a lot of poses for the player mech, (since the game is all about executing many different actions with a single button). It still only had 8 frames overall I think, but I would have had to draw each one 6 times at least to create glitch animations aren't visibly repeating. Eventually I switched to a skeletal animation for the mech, where limbs and head constantly follow an invisible sketch and animate independently from the actual pose.
The whole thing was quite the learning experience. I like the style a lot and I want to try mixing it more into my regular pixel art for future projects.
