Pixel Art Workload Visualiser

Before you choose an artstyle for your pixel art game, ask yourself: is this feasible?

An overly intensive artstyle will not only increase production time, but can also get in way of your project's iteration speed and flexibility, where a less-intensive style might have been just as aesthetically pleasing.

Resolution, palette size and animation fluidity all contribute to how much work goes into each asset. The time won by sacrificing resolution may allow for more fluid animations, and the benefits of a more efficient style are not limited to the art pipeline. The time saved on art assets may be used to improve other aspects of the game, for instance.

Pixel art illustrators often do not realize how the magnitude of work scales in a game with hundreds of assets, and first time developers underestimate how much fidelity affects the work that goes into making sprites.

I created this tool as a way of helping beginner devs and artists venturing into gamedev for the first time. It can aid in choosing an art style, weighing different options, offering a concrete image of work, preventing unnecessary pressure and keeping budgets and expectations reasonable.

It is not meant to be an accurate representation of pixel art workloads, only an abstract estimate to be used as a starting off point.