Pixel Art for Games

About Course

Course Description:

Bring your game worlds to life one pixel at a time.
This course teaches you how to create professional-quality pixel art for games, from simple sprites to detailed environments. Perfect for beginners and indie game developers, you’ll learn every essential concept step-by-step: designing characters, animating movement, building tilesets, and developing cohesive art styles for your game projects.

You’ll start with the fundamentals of pixel art understanding resolution, color palettes, and pixel placement and gradually advance to creating animated sprites, character walk cycles, and full game scenes. The lessons use free or affordable tools like Aseprite, Piskel, or Photoshop, so you can easily follow along regardless of your experience level.

By the end of the course, you’ll have a complete collection of your own game-ready pixel assets characters, props, tilesets, and UI elements ready to import into engines like Unity, Godot, or GameMaker Studio.

What You’ll Learn:

Understand the foundations of pixel art: grids, palettes, dithering, and shading
Create characters and enemies with personality and style
Animate idle, walk, attack, and jump cycles smoothly
Design tilesets and backgrounds for 2D platformers or RPGs
Develop consistent color palettes and visual styles
Build UI elements and icons that match your game’s look
Export and optimize your pixel art for Unity, Godot, or GameMaker

Course Content

Course Introduction

Introduction, Welcome to the course!

01:33
How to get a guaranteed win out of this course

02:39
What is Pixel art?

02:41
What will you need for this course?

03:22

Getting started

Creating props and animating them

Character design and animation

Background design and animation
When creating pixel art game backgrounds you will have to duplicate patterns such as bricks and grass. In this lecture you will learn how to create a brick pattern that will automatically duplicate your pattern for you. This can save you hours of work.

Creating a brick pattern for your game background

12:13
Learn how to make your foreground, mid-ground, and background look amazing!

02:59
Adding your sky and mountain range

02:24
Creating a grass pattern for your game background

09:18
Building mid-ground mountains

11:47
Learn how to create pixel art trees!

06:55
Animation waterfalls

10:20
Saving your background out as different documents for parallaxing effects

04:29
Section 5 conclusion

01:03

Pixel art game map

Building your map tiles

08:06
Adding grass texture to your land tiles

07:35
Creating rock text and adding shorelines to your map tiles

07:35
Placing your map tiles

08:01
Building a rock in the water asset

04:26
Building a bridge asset

06:06
Building a mini island asset

04:10
Building a brick house asset

06:10
Building a tree asset

09:15
Section 6 conclusion

01:18

Add this certificate to your resume to demonstrate your skills & increase your chances of getting noticed.

About Course

Course Description:

What You’ll Learn:

What Will You Learn?

Course Content

Course Introduction

Getting started

A simplified way to look at layers and what you can do with them

Shapes in your artwork

Value and contrast

Learning colour theory

Finding inspiration and reference for your pixel art game

Creating props and animating them

Adding texture and outline to your crate

Creating a diamond asset

Animating your diamond

Putting your animation into a sprite sheet

Section 3 conclusion

Character design and animation

Animating your characters run cycle

Setting up your animation in Photoshop for playback

Animating your characters jump cycle

Animating your characters hover cycle

Putting your character animation frames into a sprite sheet

Section 4 conclusion

Background design and animation When creating pixel art game backgrounds you will have to duplicate patterns such as bricks and grass. In this lecture you will learn how to create a brick pattern that will automatically duplicate your pattern for you. This can save you hours of work.

Creating a brick pattern for your game background

Learn how to make your foreground, mid-ground, and background look amazing!

Adding your sky and mountain range

Creating a grass pattern for your game background

Building mid-ground mountains

Learn how to create pixel art trees!

Animation waterfalls

Saving your background out as different documents for parallaxing effects

Section 5 conclusion

Pixel art game map

Building your map tiles

Creating rock text and adding shorelines to your map tiles

Building a rock in the water asset

Building a bridge asset

Building a mini island asset

Building a tree asset

Section 6 conclusion

Earn a certificate

Student Ratings & Reviews

Background design and animation
When creating pixel art game backgrounds you will have to duplicate patterns such as bricks and grass. In this lecture you will learn how to create a brick pattern that will automatically duplicate your pattern for you. This can save you hours of work.