It greatly delights me to say I appear to have found myself working with Tony Warriner on his rather lovely game Wormhole Dungeon. But what is it you are doing on this game then Stoo? I don’t hear you ask… Ahh it be pixel art mate, more specifically I’m adding my touch to the game tile sets.

Normally when I start a project there isn’t a lot in place, the levels are often non-existent and a lot of it is down to me to create. When Tony asked me if I would be interested in creating the tiles for this game there was already a very playable demo in existence, a demo I might add I played and immediately loved! Even though it’s early days there is a real charm and atmosphere to the game already which spawned many ideas I later put in to the finished tile set. After a couple calls on the ol’blower we soon realised that we shared a lot of ideas and to his credit, Tony pretty much gave me free reign to do what I do best, create stuff and make it look nice!

Now one of the things I had to bare in mind was the UI and sprites were already done, I liked the style they were drawn in so it was important for me to come up with something that looked good but wasn’t in anyway battling the look and feel of the existing artwork. Not always easy to do but the look was forgiving enough to allow me to get stuck in.

First job was to identify what I was going to actually create, a list was drawn up and that went on to form the basis of part 1, which basically replaced all of the existing placeholder graphics with my new stuff!
This not only allowed us to see whether I was barking up the right tree but would also spark further ideas during that pixel pushing motion I do for the rest of the graphics. These thoughts and ideas then made their way into a second list which detailed a lot of the extra bits needed to form a larger construction set of tiles Tony could use when editing up the levels.

I should add, I don’t usually do tiles without editing maps, but as a lot of the levels had been edited I was effectively making the tilesets as complete as I could to cover all possibilities based off what was already use. Think of it as making a lego set of graphics! It turned out well and the fruits of our labour can be seen along with regular updates over at the official Wormhole Dungeon development blog here, no not here, down there, on that link below!

https://ufospares.itch.io/wormhole-dungeon

Of course this is still early days and the game has a fair old way to go but let me tell you this with the lighting it really adds a lot of atmosphere during play. Working with such cool dynamic lighting is something new for me as I’m not used to seeing my pixel work in such an environment – it looks ace! There’s also the sound which is very atmospheric and like the lighting adds a lot to how you feel when you’re playing through.

Here’s a few screenshots of the game as it stands with some of the new art in and just look at that lighting! Awesome or what!