Thinking about game design and art is one of my hobbies. And I admit it: I love pixel art. And the last couple of years were a renaissance of pixel art fueled by the indie boom and games like minecraft. And right as you think you have seen it all – a new style seems to emerge: the minipixels

What?

Pixel art is often seen scaled up by 2x, 3x or more. Minipixels are different. The art usually isn’t scaled at all but still the edges are hard and no anti-alias is used. Pixelart is very small and detailed but minipixels are usually bigger pictures with bigger uniform areas since there is no upscaling involved in the postprocess. It can be made with the same tools as pixelart: the pen tool in PS/GIMP and by turning of anti-aliasing for your fills.

Examples

Relic Hunters is a free game that uses this for it’s feature art and mixes it with more ‘traditional’ pixel art:

http://www.relichunters.com.br/

The colors are totally different but in Orcish Inn we also see minipixels. Steven Colling, the developer of orcish inn, calls this a “grispy style”.

http://orcish-inn.stevencolling.com

(Disclaimer: I work on the music for that game. But that does not change that I really like the graphics that Steven made!)

Is this is a thing now?

I don’t know if this a thing or will be. But I think it might be. It is nice to look at when used correctly and a nice fresh breeze after years of blocky pixels. Do you have more examples? Do you like this style? Do you want to see more games with this?