Art Direction + Pixel Art
Brawlstars 8-bit
In celebration of the new Brawl Stars, we tag-teamed with W+K to hide three magnificent minigames within Supercell’s popular mobile game.
Meta in too many ways, Project Laser, Slugfest and Starrcade Breakdown are as much a homage to the very game in which they’re featured as they’re a tribute to gaming itself. The minigames can be unlocked by tapping Brawl Stars’ least-chosen character, 8-BIT, eight times. Each minigame acts as a portal to the next as players dive deeper into gaming history and the mind and malice of 8-BIT—uncovering the character’s secret origin story. I had the pleasure doing the art direction for this game but luckily also had some time to work on the actual pixel art.
MediaMonks | W+K | Supercell
Gameplay video
Project Laser
The first game was the game that should look the most modern, but still should have a retro vibe to it. I used an unlimited color palette and allowed myself to use gradients while still drawing the characters and objects in pixel art. We also made the choice to have this game in double the resolution then the other 2 to allow for more crisp graphics. This game was fully illustrated by myself.
32-bit Project Laser logo
32-bit cutscenes
Space shooter gameplay
Slugfest
For the second game we took inspiration from the 16-bit era games like double dragon, fist of fury and many other games. The pallet brought back the colour palette and aside from some dithered gradients we used more solid color fills. The logo and cutscenes where illustrated by myself but for the game Mattyn Klaassen worked on the background and Grace Wattimury the characters.
16-bit slugfest logo
16-bit cutscenes
Brawler gameplay
Starrcade Breakdown
In the last easter egg level 8-bit went back to his roots, the old arcade. This game is an homage to old 8-bit platform games like Super Mario and Metroid Prime. The color palette is limited to 8 colors to mimic the graphics on old consoles. For this game I mainly did the art direction while most graphics were made by my colleague Mattyn Klaassen.
8-bit Starrcade Breakdown logo
8-bit Cutscenes
8-bit platformer