Welcome to SmallBurg... quaint little world for your game.

The start...

I've always loved pixel art... Ever since I first I saw a megadrive back in 1992, I fell in love with pixel art, and I have always dabbled in this medium all of my life.

A year ago I had the idea to create a small little game like Stardew valley, Forager or Little wood and there were no pack that delivered what I wanted. So I started creating some assets here and there... The code went nowhere as I struggled to balance being a Lead developer of a Mobile Game company and a indie developer at home, but the pixel art always stuck with me.

Smallburg started to form in my mind, but I didn't push for it. So I toiled away at my daily work, and continued to make other stuff.

Come December 2021 and I decided to make this a reality... A cute, clear art for a farming/rpg game. 

The character

The first thing I did was create a set of characters that could be expanded in a simple way. For this I created a layered character.

This way I can add more clothing to the packs and still make it work for every character.

I really enjoyed making these as the more I draw them, the more I wanted to create this new world.

The land

So I started with the terrain. Characters have to walk on something, right? I wanted something clean and simple, and this was what I came up with. I will not lie, I took some ideas from forager.

I love the clean look of it. Once again the more it appeared, the more I wanted to continue developing it.

And of course, you need some blue to balance all of that green, so I made some water.

It may not look like it, but I tried several animations until I went with this basic one, it felt the most satisfying and in place for this world.

Then with this in place, I started wanting more and more...

The house system

I wanted to have a way to display both types of houses, a simple way where the outside is not the same as the inside and a correlation of 1 to 1 with the outside size and the inside one.
For this I need tiled houses.

This made me add a way to have proper interiors and have the two different ways of showing houses in game. The same way with the chracter, you can mix and match and create different houses.

I still want to improve this system, but for starters, its good enough.

The is more to the pack, piers, paths, flowers, trees and a lot more. I am really enjoying making this asset and I want to expand it in the future with more content.

For now there is still a running animation that I want to add to the pack and more clothing.
See you soon with more information