Creating a Pokemon-like in PICO-8: Pixel Art

8192 Tokens, 32 colours, 256 possible sprites - Is this even possible? Let's start with the aesthetics

The first Pokemon game I owned was Pokemon Yellow Edition which had an interesting twist, your starter was Pikachu instead of Charmander, Bulbasaur or Squirtle leaving that aside the structure of monster taming games is well known:

• Your creature is ready to battle other monster owners

• You need to weaken other monsters to capture them, so they are part of your team

• Spawn of monsters is based on location

• Obtain medals to become best trainer in the world

The structure is so well known that when another Pokemon title is released our expectations are neutral and despite Game Freak doing the same thing, they have another best-seller on the market.

This love and hate history is what inspired me to create my own version for PICO-8. Because I’m visuals oriented before I can start any deep programming session I need to create sprites, mockups, maps and here I’m ready to share this adventure.

Cover Prototype for my PICO-8 Cartridge

I think one strong aspect of Pokemon or any other monster tamer game is around their creatures and how they look like, specially at the 1st Gen, most of them were close enough to animals we all know

Looking at the previous image, indeed some creatures may be too fantastic or doesn’t have any relation at all with animals that exist, but that mostly apply to Generations beyond the 3rd, first and second kept following their internal mantra of animal design first.

Given said that, as I really like first pokemon generations and animals in general (my lovely cat canela is on my side meanwhile I write this article) I will create my art direction following this principles:

• 80% of the creatures should be closer to our known animals.

• Monster Paradise is the name chosen, as our protagonist received an invitation to spend 3 days on an artificially built island called Similan

• Boats, wild areas and modernly built houses will be present at the adventure

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The Creatures

I love minimalistic aesthetics (Marathon is a banger, despite it’s number of players) and I followed that principle of keep it super simple and clear, as soon as I started with the turtle the next 6 monsters were really easy for me to create given PICO-8 limitations.

Each animal is just a 8x8 sprite that combines between 3 and 5 colours (Max)

The World

The world is super interesting as I really want to create a modern-kind of artificial island vibe, where the player may think, this is too idyllic for the protagonist to receive a free invitation. We just have 32 Colors on a 2D world to trigger that impact which is an important challenge, but storytelling and imagination at pixels could do the rest for us.

I hope you liked this project, I’m really excited as this is my first small project where the main theme, fantasy and intention is quite clear since the beginning.

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Bonus Track

I’m originally from Spain and I started another project on Youtube where I plan to release Spanish content about Fantasy console gamedev. The channel is called Fantasydevs