Process notes, colour experiments and the occasional post-mortem. Written whenever a sprite refuses to behave.
Why we start every sprite with five colours
It is tempting to open a fresh canvas with a full palette and pick whatever looks right. We used to do that, and our sprites came out muddy: too many almost-identical greens, shadows that fought each other, highlights that did not belong to the same light.
Now every new character starts with exactly five colours: an outline, a shadow, a base, a light and one accent. If the sprite reads clearly with those five, we are allowed to add a sixth. Most of the time we never need it.
The constraint also makes animation faster. With five colours there are only so many ways to break a silhouette, so frames stay consistent without a lot of cleanup.
Hue shifting: shadows are not just darker
A shadow that is simply the base colour with less brightness looks grey and lifeless. Real shadows pick up the colour of the sky and the surroundings, so we shift them: greens drift towards blue as they get darker, reds drift towards purple, and highlights lean warm.
Rule of thumb: rotate the hue about 15–25° per step, and lower the saturation slightly as you approach the darkest tone.
The difference is most visible on foliage. A tree drawn with hue-shifted greens feels like it is standing in daylight; the same tree with plain darker greens looks like a plastic model.
Making a game you can finish in ten minutes
Windfall started as a weekend exercise: one mechanic, one screen, one season. The hard part was not the code, it was saying no. Every idea that did not make the ten-minute run better went into a notebook instead of the game.
What survived: apples fall faster as the day goes on, leaves cost you a life, and the first frost ends the run. That is the whole game, and players finish it — which is more than we could say about our earlier, much bigger projects.
Autumn tileset: 48 tiles, three seasons of revisions
The autumn tileset took longer than any character we have drawn. Tiles have to connect in every direction, read at a distance and still look interesting up close. We redrew the grass edges four times before they stopped forming visible stripes across large maps.
The final set has 48 tiles: ground, paths, fences, fallen leaves, two kinds of trees and a small cider house. It ships with the Seed Packets asset pack, free for personal and commercial use.