#16 bit

Ifone of my first few art posts on this blog is any indication, I love making sprite art. While I didn’t necessarily consider myself much of a sprite artist back when I first joined tumblr in April of last year, the progress I’ve made in improving upon what I could do with pixels since is considerable.

Up until very recently, however, most if not all of my sprite pieces were done in an 8-Bit visual style, seeing as NES-Styled sprites are the easiest for me to make— there’s just something so fun about working with limitations and seeing how few colors one could use to make a visually stunning sprite.

With this, the thought of attempting something in a 16-Bit visual style didn’t cross my mind for quite some time. I was convinced for a bit (Pun absolutely intended) that my skill in sprite art was limited to a faux NES visual style, though with the unveiling of Override a little bit ago, it was pretty clear to me that my skillset exceeded eight mere bits.

And to see if it really did, I wanted to challenge myself with a task: sprite something that looks like it’d fit right in with Mega Man 7 on the SNES, cartoony yet solid visual flair and all. At first, I wasn’t sure what I could attempt making a 16-Bit sprite of…

But a fellow practitioner of shovelry was all I needed for inspiration!

With a franchise like Shovel Knight bearing an iconic faux NES visual style, it was only a matter of time before fans began to wonder what the titular spade-spinner would look like with a double the bits, and because of this, quite a few SNES-esque iterations of Shovel Knight and company are out there.

My goal, however, wasn’t to create the definitive 16-Bit styled Shovel Knight. As I mentioned, I wanted to really take into consideration how Mega Man 7’s sprites looked in particular (I.E. size, colors, shading styles, etc.) and reference Shovel Knight’s original sprite to ultimately concoct an upgraded, SNES-ified Shovel Knight.

Keeping these limitations in check, I managed to draw a sprite of the blue burrower using only eleven colors in contrast to Mega Man’s twelve— a whole color less! At one point in the sprite’s creation, I used twelve colors, though swapped out a dark grey for a dark blue. It isn’t very often in my sprite posts that I provide a step-by-step process on how I go about spriting, though for this post…

I’ve made a gif of the process using the various pieces I had on my workspace! You’ll notice a few things change as the sprite is shaped, the most obvious to me are his legs, which go from a solid placeholder color to fully shaded and then fixed a bit in the span of a few frames.

My end result really does prove that I can sprite whatever I can set my mind to, doesn’t it? I was NOT expecting the turnout to look so clean and faithful to the style I was going for, and it was really fun making it! Perhaps in the future, I could try my hand at a 16-Bit King Knight, or even SNES-ifying some of my Mega Man robot master OCs! Until that happens, though, I hope you’ve enjoyed my deep dive into the creation of what Shovel Knight may have looked like in the mid-90s!