We took Unstable Scientific to Playtest Thursday at the NYU Game Center in Brooklyn (and got really good feedback as to what’s good and what needs to be fixed)! I was blown away at how many developers there are, as well as the sheer diversity of game devs and game design students. It was FANTASTICALLY FUN!

Quantum chemist and entanglement researcher, Pixel Harding!

Lev deep lava death animation. We eventually got rid of insta-death mechanics and turned the lava into a temporary death pit, where you come back to the nearest solid land with only significant health loss but no lengthy level reloads.

Early character sketches for Unstable Scientific. I draw the faces, Dustin scribbles what emotions he thinks they express. It’s a lot harder to make good expressions with so few pixels in a hi-bit game, so I try to really get the character down on paper before turning them into pixel art! You can kind of see them evolve a little bit over time, especially Tau (guy with the AR rig) and Chandra (pilot lady with floofy jacket).

This came out delightfully gross.

Introducing Tau Jacquino, the best electronic engineer alive and Burning Man interactive installation artist for 20+ years. He’s here because he wants to see something really awesome happen, and vacuum physics looks like the most exciting field to be!

There has to be a cryostat somewhere in the game.

Cordyceps fungi as an in-game hazard!

Bubble gun test! And now there’s also a ray pistol. Look at all those bananas fly all over the place!

Unused kleptocoon animation

Before we turned off fall damage, you could really hurt yourself! Lev has -437.80 life. Caused by launching really high with a banana gun!

When your ride’s trash but your outfit’s on point.

Chaos is tricky to animate, especially in pixel art! I had fun trying to make this collapsing platform convincing.

A variety of animations I made for the trilobite, which we decided to keep as a friendly critter.

This is part of the multi-layered, animated background for the lava cave level. I finished it in June of 2017. In the game it has parallax scrolling and everything! I’m really satisfied with how it came out.

A variety of early scorpion sprites

Drippy crystal lava tunnel for the lava level! Good god this took a long time to make. It’ll definitely end up serving some other purpose besides being merely a decorative obstacle.

An early test of our Jungle Level from 2017. There wasn’t yet much to do here, and the music wasn’t final either, but it was so much fun to see it in action!

This is the base Jungle Level background, made in the early stages of our game. There would ultimately be more layers added in, and it would be taller to add a level of verticality.

I decided to break away from a purist pixel art aesthetic and used custom Photoshop brushes, pixelized with randomized colors, angles, and roundness.

Finished the lightning background for Silver Craters.