Scene from "Fussy Ambassador Lollie".
Released by FoxSoft for Sony PlayStation, 1997.
It is common knowledge that the fox population shares its collective braincells through Fox-To-Fox Communication, but when the Fussy Ambassador discovers that one of his allotted braincells hasn't called home, he tracks a trail of clues to a Gentleman who is anything but.
In August 2024, as part of a push to produce more pixel art and low-poly pieces, I whipped up a handful of sketches in the style of fantasy game screenshots. One of these sketches was a follow-up to 2023's pixel art piece, "Fussy Ambassador Lollie". This was also an opportunity to accost my friend Effses with long-overdue gift art.
AND SO I DID.
Final Fantasy Tactics
Vagrant Story
For the 3D environment, I took inspiration from Final Fantasy Tactics and Vagrant Story. These were games that were built around isometric tiles in one way or another, but the use of 3D allowed for much more flexibility in what was considered a tile.
Using an orthographic view allowed me to leverage perspective tricks in the textures, while the lighting, shading, and alpha effects were all achieved with vertex colors.
Underrated trick that immediately falls apart as soon as you look at it from another angle.
I built the environment out of 8×8px tiles using the Blender addon ReSprytile, and the scene made use of Drips PSX EFX for its simulated affine texture mapping and screen-space vertex snapping. Blender's compositor was also used to simulate the PS1-style rimlight and subtractive blending.
The sprites pulled loose inspiration from games like Super Mario RPG for SNES and Paper Mario for N64, but there were two other obscure PS1 titles that came to mind: Crime Crackers 2 and Animetic Story Game 1: Cardcaptor Sakura. The latter two titles featured isometric pixel-art character sprites with anime styling, which was more in line with the over-dramatic vibes that I wanted to capture in the scene.
Crime Crackers 2
Animetic Story Game 1: Cardcaptor Sakura
Front Mission 3
The Misadventures of Tron Bonne
The character portraits fell somewhere between the traditional markers and paints of Front Mission 3, and the clean and crisp pixel art of The Misadventures of Tron Bonne. My portraits started in Clip Studio Paint as high-resolution digital art, and were then reduced in both scale and colors to match their intended resolution and aspect ratio. From there, they received manual per-pixel touch ups in Aseprite to ensure that their new pixel forms faithfully matched their original high-resolution counterparts.
Speaking of resolution and aspect ratio, I had planned from the beginning to use a screen resolution of 384×256px, and a non-square Pixel Aspect Ratio of 4:5, resulting in pixels that were taller than square. This would allow me to squeeze a little more detail in on the horizontal axis, without impacting its overall pixel-art qualities.
The inner border of the portrait window is technically a 80×80px square!
As a result of this, I wrote a tiny Lua script for Aseprite, so that I could easily switch between tall and square pixels. You can find that script right here, and on Itch.io. Installation is simple: In Aseprite, navigate to File > Scripts > Open Scripts Folder.
Once again, all of the typefaces on display are bespoke, made specifically for the piece. The only glyphs that exist are those you can see in the final image. I vow to one day give my future selves a break and produce complete fonts that I can reuse over and over, but today is not that day.
Finally, the image was processed via Unity with the use of these assets:
I also made good use of ShaderGlass while spriting and testing 3D renders, it's an exceptionally useful tool for Aseprite in particular. My favorites can be found under the "presets-tvout" folder: "tvout+ntsc-256px-composite" and "tvout-snes-hires-blend".
For the record, due to Lollie and Effses both being foxes, the damage numbers they deal to each other are completely worthless.
