Darin Hilton Art and Design

8 BIT PIXEL ART

Environment designs, art direction and 2d Animation

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Environment concepts done in 'Dpaint' an old pixel art editor for a proposed Sega Genesis 'Aliens vs Predator' game.

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Environment and character designs for a SNES game based on a cartoon TV show called 'Operation Aliens'

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Pixel art from the SNES game 'Warlock'

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SNES environments and characters from the game Warlock.

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Part of the intro pan and opening sequence to 'Warlock'

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Environment designs for a desert level from the Sega Saturn game 'Bug!'

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Environment designs for a lava level from the Sega Saturn game 'Bug!'

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More environment designs for Sega's 'Bug!' this is the 'swamp' level.

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Sega Bug! grassy level

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Sega Bug! ice level

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Pixel art game projects

A collection of game projects I worked on for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. All the artwork was 'painted' with a mouse (Wacom tablets weren't widely available then) pixel by pixel using Electronic Arts Dpaint and Dpaint animator. We had a palette of 256 colors which then had to be translated down to sometimes 16 colors (in the case of the Genesis). Coming from a traditional art background took a bit of a transition to digital, luckily my boss at the time had commissioned some work from Mark Ferrari http://www.markferrari.com/ a master of pixel art, I learnt how to do color cycling for water effects, dithering for transparency effects just by poring over his files.

I can't say I miss the tools but even to this day I'm pretty impressed with what we were able to make given the limitations. I kept using Dpaint and Dpaint Animator well into the Sega Saturn days before moving to 3d software and early versions of Adobe Photoshop.

I worked on an adaptation of the movie 'Warlock' into an action game as well as several attempts at games based on the Aliens franchise for the SNES and Genesis, the SNES version was supposed to be timed to the launch of a television show called 'Operation Aliens'. Unfortunately it didn't seem to get traction as interest in the franchise was waning at the time and the show wasn't well received, kids just weren't into creepy xenomorphs that attach to peoples faces and blow back out their chests, go figure!

One of the most fun projects we got to do was Bug! a launch title for the Sega Saturn, one of the first 3d consoles. A 2.5d platformer I was tasked with producing all of the environment art and the fx animations which at the time were difficult to produce in 3d, these were all hand drawn in DPaint Animator.

We launched at E3 and at the event, I briefly meet Steven Spielberg, his kids apparently really loved playing the game!