Space Cowboy (2024-2025)
Demo footage of the game post-game jam in November 2024
Role: Pixel Artist
Tools: Aseprite, Unity, Github, Godot
Timeline: December 2024, April-May 2025
OVERVIEW
Space Cowboy is a pixel art visual novel game made in Unity for Quiver Games' Town One game jam event from Friday Nov 8-10th. The event's theme was "space vehicles" and I worked in a team of 7. I contributed to the project as a pixel artist and created visual assets for the game. After the game jam, the team and I decided to keep working on it and have been slowly adding to the game as of May 2025.
Players take the role of a Space Cowboy who transports cargo through space on jobs. Throughout these jobs, the player will encounter a couple of different events involving aliens and space pirate that impede their progress. The player must then give up or use different resources such as cargo or fuel in order to get out of these situations and finish the job.
My Contributions:
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In this project, I served as a character artist who created mainly character portraits and vehicle designs. I illustrated these 2D sprites using Aseprite, an illustration program geared towards making animated sprites.
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In total, I created 7 character sprites (1 player and 6 non-playable characters), 6 ships, 3 cargo boxes, and 4 game end state screens. This was done over Nov 9-10th as the team and I planned out our idea the day before and began to work. During the planning meeting on the first day, I helped come up with the concept of the game using past experience creating a board game that worked in "rounds". This helped the team and I ideate a roguelike structure where players would experience a different story every time.
Skills and Tools
Various assets I developed in Aesprite during the game jam
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Created portrait sprites in Aseprite, making a lot of assets very fast to fit the needs of our game.
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Used Unity and Github to send assets to my teammates through developer branches so that they could code.
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Quickly ideated by drawing from past experiences, helping the team quickly come up with a solid project plan
The Challenge
The Space Truck as seen in-game
While my team's challenge revolved around managing code implementation scope, my challenge was creating all the visual assets we needed. I also had to challenge my design ethos when it came to foreground object creation. In a lot of pixel art games that I grew up with, foreground objects such as player characters have a black outline around them. This wouldn't work in Space Cowboy as the background is primarily black, so I used lighter colors to make sure important objected popped out from the background. To save time, I also forwent shading as I needed to create a lot of assets in a short time. As we now have much more time to work on this project post-game jam, I intent to go back and shade and add more details to the assets I made.
In the end, my team's programmers weren't able to resolve some larger bugs that came up on Sunday and a lot of the art I made ended up not getting implemented.
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I also wasn't initially enthusiastic about the game jam's "space vehicle" theme, but managed to work past it. During the brainstorming process, I was able to draw from past experiences creating a collaborative board game that had set rounds to help my team come up with the framework for the game. This ended up being a crucial step to help the team figure out our concept.
Final Reflection
A mockup of what an encounter with a space pirate would look like
While it was disappointing that my art didn't get used too much, I was very grateful for the experience and had a great time working with my team. ​We all got along well enough to decide to finish the game on our own time and see our initial vision through. It was a good teamwork experience that I hope to do again in the future.
Future Ventures
Some updated sprites from November 2024 to January 2025
After the game jam in November 2024, the team and I agreed to reconvene a couple months later to work on the game further in order to deliver a feature-complete demo. I started by uploading a couple of touched up sprites from the game jam, adding a bit more detail that I did not have time to during the event. I however, did not go the full length with the added detail as I was starting work soon and thus wouldn't have time to remake everything.
New sprites made for an update in April 2025
Later, in late April 2025, I would have time to add more sprites and made designs based off of loose specifications as given to me by my teammates who worked on the writing and programming of the game. I matched the detailing present in my January 2025 update and worked on creating more striking visual designs that fit with what I made prior in the game jam.
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As of May 2025, the game demo is currently being worked on with future updates pending on the demo's reception.