BlackMoon Design » Pixel Art

Firefoxzilla is back!

Robert — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 14:15:23 +0000

I’ve created another pixel-art illustration with Firefoxzilla (huge Fire-fox like mechanical droid that helps people) for challenge on Mozilla’s Creative Collective. It got to the top finals and scored quite a huge number of votes.
Let’s hope Firefoxzilla will keep coming back:)

Just visiting, a pixel art commission for Digital Artist magazine

Robert — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 08:46:56 +0000

I’ve created this pixel-art illustration for the purpose of the article I wrote for Digital Artist magazine. The article (and illustration itself) was published in April’s issue.
The illustration is titled “Just visiting” and it depicts a London street with a huge, ugly monster taking photos of BigBen (as you can see below).

Click on the image to check bigger image

The article is basically a overview of pixel-art style combined with a 6 page long tutorial on creating a isometric city scene in Photoshop and PixAIR (PixAIR is a small AIR application for creating pixel art developed by one of the BlackMoon’s team members – Michał).

Our article in SDJ

Robert — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 07:00:12 +0000

BlackMoon team write up a article for a magazine Software Developer Journal, about the process of creation a Flash game – starting with the idea, how to design graphics and what are the best code techniques. We’ve created a arcade style game called “Asteroid Raid” especially for the article purpose (the game will be launched soon as we’re still tweaking it). The game utilizes some nice pixel art and run over PixelBlitz engine created by Richard Davey.
Stay tuned for the coming game – in the meanwhile I encourage you to grab a copy of SDJ magazine from the nearest store and enjoy;)

A pixel art virtual world for children

Robert — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 12:01:18 +0000

Let me tell you about one of the biggest project we’ve done so far.
Imagine huge virtual worlds depicted with pixel-art style with over 30 games and activities. With hundreds of children visiting it every day – that’s what we did with our friends from HexagonIT.
The project is called “Children’s Church” and that’s exactly what it is – a virtual church for children, full of fun and educational at the same time.
We’ve created a sophisticated engine in Flash, which supports multi-user interaction (using Flash Media Server) and enables over 30 flash games to be played (each of them skillfully crafted by BlackMoon’s team). Of course the virtual world is a living space, so we’ve made adding new games or special activities painless.
There’s some sweet pixel-art based graphics for the main app and for all the games, so the whole world get’s a really nice “retro” flavour.

The whole pixel world image is beneath the link (please note that this image is huge!)

There are many rooms – each with it’s own funtion. For example – the crypt is full of games.

There are many different kinds of games – each testing player agility or wits.

When some major church events are coming (like Christmas or Easter) we add some new activities corresponding to the event.

The children can explore the colorful and little fantastic world.

There’s a school where teachers can have a live virtual Sunday School class

Of course the main purpose of the church – praying, is also included

There are really quite a lot of different rooms for children to play with.

The service is totally in finnish, so unfortunatelly it’s rather hard to play all those games if you’re outside of Finland (there’s a very high protection, as the multi-user service for kids needs a special care).

At last – this project took a lot of effort from BlackMoon employees and collabolators. I would like to give them huge kudos for the great work here.

Escape from the Planet of Robot Monsters – new flash game by BlackMoon released on Facebook

Robert — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 10:53:00 +0000

We’ve just launched a new flash game on Facebook (and several other platforms). It’s called “Escape form the Planet of Robot Monsters” and it’s light, funny shoot-them-up game. The main character is our astronaut Al (of course) and his monkey companion Scrappy. We’ve chosen the nice, pixel-art style for the game to add some retro flavour to it.
Go ahead and try the game here – I bet you won’t get to the highscore;)

Firefoxzilla protects the city

Robert — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 08:00:30 +0000

Wow – my last pixel art piece won the 3rd place at Infectious contest. You can buy that design as laptop/iphone skin and soon it’ll be available as t-shirt and Firefox persona skin.

click to enlarge

Mecha-Firefoxzilla

Robert — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 07:21:18 +0000

We love pixel art here at BlackMoon. So – when I chosen to join the Infectious contest “People & Robots – Best Friends Forever”, the option to create pixel-art illustration was pretty obvious.
After some hard work – here it is! The piece is called “Mecha-Firefoxzilla protecting the city from evil IEBots”, and you can check it out here (oh, and please – vote on it;).

New blog by me Perfect Pixel Art

Robert — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 10:19:19 +0000

I’ve established new blog, called Perfect Pixel Art. As the name suggest – it’ll be mostly about pixel art.
Go ahead and check it out at perfectpixelart.blogspot.com.
And yes – there’s a pixel-arted version of Al in the header;)

I love blogging! – pixel art

Robert — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 20:18:32 +0000

Some time ago I wrote about Infectious and WordPress competition about blog related laptop design.
So – I almost missed the deadline, but I was able to come up with something I really like.
It’s pixel-art based illustration showing “blogger enviroment”.
You can see (and vote for) the whole thing here.