Readable Pixels: Pixel Art for Games

Readable Pixels is a 12-page field guide to pixel art for games. It's built around one test: a player has to recognise your sprite in a fraction of a second, in motion, over a busy background.

Across nine chapters you build Moss Keep, a 320×180 top-down adventure screen: a knight and his walk cycle, a slime, a chest, a tree and a six-tile set, all from one 16-colour palette. Every sprite, tile and diagram in the book was placed pixel by pixel for it.

What's inside

• Canvas and scale: base resolutions that scale clean to 1080p and 4K, sprite sizes, and why mixed pixel sizes break a game.
• Lines and curves: even runs, clean arcs, no doubles or orphan pixels.
• Shape and silhouette: the black-fill test and the greyscale value check.
• Colour: a 16-colour palette with hue-shifted ramps, hex codes included and free to use.
• Shading and outlines: one light source, pillow shading, selective outlines and hand anti-aliasing.
• Dithering: when patterns help and when they turn into noise.
• Tiles: seam tests, variants and edges between ground types.
• Animation: frame counts and timings that work, squash and stretch, an attack frame by frame.
• Into the engine: crisp settings for Unity, Godot 4 and GameMaker, plus an export checklist.

The last page is a 7-day practice plan: an hour a day takes you to a finished screen of your own.

Details

• 12-page A4 PDF in English, text selectable and searchable.
• Works with Aseprite, LibreSprite, Pixelorama, Photoshop or Krita.
• The Moss 16 palette is yours to use in any project, commercial or not.
• Written and illustrated with AI assistance, then fact-checked against the sources named in the book. All images are original renders, original pixel art or CC0 material: no screenshots of commercial games.