Kirby and The Forgotten Land - ROUGH (Patreon)

Kirby and The Forgotten Land had to be one of the most chill and also excruciatingly difficult demakes I've done and it's all about that adorable little pink blob! 

Designing a 16x16 Kirby sprite at times felt like trying to redesign the wheel. In 2bit, with only 3 colours, Kirby's design is so deceptively simple. Pink orb, stubby stubs, big shoes. But through this simplicity, there's really no room for error or playing with certain elements. For comparison, a Mario sprite, whilst not only being bigger and gives way for more experimentation in how you play with body composition (bigger head, real big exaggerated nose and moustache, big hat, big belly, big or small eyes or no eyes at all and have the hat droop over his face) etc etc. Kirby is truly, a circle, with eyes. 

With all that said, I think I still landed on a pretty decent final sprite for the little orb, utilising my "lean into painting with black" and making his shoes blocked out as you can see in the doodle. 

I probably had the most fun with the figurine screen, while both straight forward and simple, I do quite relish pixelling large bust/sprites like the Wild mistah' Frosty here, and it was fun practice pixelling fur! Also sea lions are always cute. 

And out of 8 screens, I only used logo mode (360 unique tiles on screen) twice! So not too bad. The fast food kirby minigame clocked in at 277 and the spooky haunted smooch-othon screen was 261. Truly wouldn't have been too much work to get those down to 256 but not being too far off is a good start! 

Will hopefully keep this in mind going onward and upward :D.