Yokai Nights

I'm excited to submit this piece for the GB Pixel Art Jam 2025. The limit of having 192 unique sprites for the image seemed daunting at first. The GB Tile Counter was a huge help in this department. I could upload my file and see how many unique tiles I had. I came up with some repeating background and ground tiles, and that freed me up to use many unique tiles for the characters. 

The theme for this years Jam is "balance". At first I thought of a game where you have to balance like Super Monkey Ball; but that seemed too on the nose. It was around this time that I was thinking of how Final Fantasy VI has a World of Balance and a World of Ruin. I leaned into the idea of a world of balance, and what that might look like. Maybe the player in this game has to restore balance to the world, through fighting Yokai at night. I'd play that game! 

The limitation of having a one bit color made me keep imagining a skeleton as the player character. I mean, skeletons look so good against a black background. I played around with this idea, but wanted to put more details in the skeleton, so I created the large skeleton Yokai as an enemy type. The rest of the pieces seemed to fall into place once I created this character, it reminded me of the ukiyo-e print Takiyaha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre by Utagawa Kuniyoshi. This got me thinking that a samurai for the player character would be a really fun game to play. So I worked out the samurai's look for the piece.

I enjoyed this Art Jam very much. Good luck to everyone else who is participating. Happy pixel hunting!