Other than me, no one has worked on Fallen Gods as long as Dan, who jumped into the fray in June 2014. At the time, my ambitions from the project’s visuals were modest: I pictured simple hex tiles like in table-top campaigns and “3/4 perspective combat sprites akin to those of old school jRPGs like Breath of Fire or Ogre Battle.” Dan assured me we could do better, and sent an amazing first pass at the combat sprite for the fighter. There was no looking back.

To “animate” literally means “to breathe life into,” and Dan breathes life into his pixels—with just a few frames, he’s able to convey not only motion but also weight, momentum, and personality. We were very fortunate that when Strangeland needed a step up for some of its key animations (walk cycle, talk cycle, etc.), Dan was there to help on that game, too. So his breath will have infused two Wormwood Studios titles once Fallen Gods is released. (And in addition to doing FG’s pixel work, he has also contributed a number of illustrations to the game.)

Dan is the only Wormwood Studios collaborator I’ve met in person—we used to break bread (or slurp noodles, at any rate) at a dive pho restaurant in Los Angeles—and I just had the great pleasure of meeting up with him at a dive izakaya in Japan, which has been his home for years. Within moments of Dan ordering food for us, one artist, then three artists, had come over and engaged Dan (and, with him translating, me) in conversation. This was not an artists’ bar or Dan’s usual stomping grounds, just a testament to some inherent spark in Dan that kindles artistic communities wherever he goes. He has brought that same light and warmth to the Fallen Gods development team.

You can see more of Dan’s work (including his non-pixel art) at his portfolio[www.bydanielmiller.com] and read his answers below.

- Mark Y.

Mark: The sprites in Fallen Gods range from tiny world-map avatars just a few pixels in height to huge foes that fill a quarter of the screen, but somehow you’ve created all of this artwork pixel by pixel. What stays the same in working at these different scales and what, if anything, changes?

Dan: To me, from a drawing standpoint, quite a bit changes. In fact, I look at them completely differently.

Higher resolution digital artwork likes to masquerade as a traditional drawing or painting form, but considering the hand position, the tool shape, the floating posture, and the approach between media and substrate, I see it as closer to spray paint or airbrush. For me, that correlation holds true in the techniques that I apply at higher resolutions. There are more additive and reductive capabilities in terms of color and line, and hand movement has a more direct effect on line gesture and weight. Also, a line can be calibrated gradually by pushing back and forth between negative and positive space on either side, carving its edges with continuous gestural movement.

Smaller resolution work, on the other hand, is to me closer to actual mosaic tile or textile as a technique. There’s a greater emphasis on compositional space, tangent making, and symmetry. Also, the smaller work really emphasizes the magic that is almost unique to pixel art in the precision of color selection. When a desired line crosses a pixel, or two colors must share a single pixel—it’s never as simple as mixing the two, or determining the dominant color by percentage; in my experience it’s always a case-by-case process of experimentation based on “feel” or “impact,” and often the desired result comes in wildly unexpected ways.

Of course, a larger-scale pixel art image can be zeroed in and calibrated on a fine scale, and a smaller sprite contains gesture, but in my experience, smaller sprites can get lost in the weeds very easily, and larger sprites can get stuffy or lose their sense of life if they’re too overcooked, and so I try to preserve the unique capabilities of both.

Mark: What are some of the most challenging aspects you’ve faced in creating the pixel art for Fallen Gods?

Dan: In the animation work itself, sometimes the greatest challenges come out of nowhere. Years ago, I remember being brought to my knees by a slither cycle of a snake sprite, whereas human walk cycles (seemingly much more complex) never gave me too much trouble. More recently, I spent about an hour on a successful drawing of a hand for a cursor, and then set out to draw a second hand sprite in a slightly different position, and it took me about 5 hours. Conversely, sometimes I’ll lose confidence and think that there’s no way I’m capable of animating certain things (such as a recent animation of an eagle turning in mid-air), and I’ll spend a great deal of time agonizing over the hypothetical, but when I finally get past my emotion and start animating, things sometimes go much more smoothly than I thought.

But I think that for me, the larger challenge has been in the massive amount of work that game creation requires. The work itself is a pleasure, and I find it fascinating and massively fulfilling, but once days click over into months and years, it can be both a cause and an effect of feature creep, and this has been a huge learning process. It can be hard to watch out for which visual features are going to take months to accomplish, let alone which ones are worth it or not. And by the time a shiny new aspect is in the game and in the process of climbing that mountain, my capabilities inevitably improve, and eventually it can make the earlier work obsolete, so it’s difficult to avoid this trap of constantly redoing everything.

Another huge challenge for me is the social isolation of this work. I’ve never really felt safe in online communities, including art and gaming communities, and I’ve had some traumatic experiences, so I tend to shy away. But in my day-to-day life, especially as I take in years, the people that I can have an absorbing conversation with about video games can be few and far between, and I can count on one hand the people that would specifically be willing to spend time talking about pixel art. This makes me all the more grateful to be in contact with this incredible team, and our weekly meetings are such sweet succor, but it can be very frustrating to love an art form which for most is disposable, and of which there is little widespread understanding of the massive labor and intricate work involved.

Mark: You joined Fallen Gods just one month into its now decade-long development cycle. Has anything changed about your approach to the game over the years?

Dan: Before FG, I had spent a few years doing throwaway work for throwaway mobile games, where I would give sprites and then have no input or involvement in the back and forth of their implementation. I came to FG with a lot of big, blustery ideas about what pixel art “should” be. I think that in these 10 years, with all the skills and technique I’ve gained, I’ve also softened and been humbled quite a bit. I’ve experienced the sacrifice that is required to connect artwork to programming language, and I’ve gained a lot more patience and perspective. I think I’m much more willing and less emotional when a new approach or a workaround is needed, or when a nice shiny perfect idea needs to be scrapped. I’m no longer a unified pixel grid dogmatist (although I think my dogmatism might have rubbed off on Mark).

I’ve known James since 2010, when he joined the Primordia team as its coder about two weeks into development, and he was one of the “three musketeers” who started Wormwood Studios in May 2012. Alas, because he’s in Greece and I’m in the U.S., we’ve never met face-to-face, but despite that he’s a dear friend and a role model to my daughters—whom he’s known since their birth and who view him as the consummate problem-solver and as the instigator of many of the “Crispinisms” I wrote for Primordia.

There’s no one I’ve collaborated with as much in game development as James—a third of my life!—and no commercial Wormwood Studios game has ever been released without him. So when he was able to join Fallen Gods in 2022, my stress level dropped considerably.

You can follow James on Twitter and read his answers below.

- Mark Y.

Mark: You’ve coded every commercial Wormwood Studios release: Primordia, Strangeland, and your own action-platformer Until I Have You. What unique challenges has Fallen Gods presented?

James: It’s a genre in which I have little expertise for starters. While very complex, it is also uniquely fascinating to see all the inner systems of such a game come together and understand how they work.

The biggest challenge has to have been the map generation algorithm. The most difficult part has been making it stable and ensuring that while it is randomly and procedurally generating content, but at the same time is not constrained due to some technicality. Within the generation algorithm of the game, there’s a lot of inner algorithms—detecting roads, erasing weird shapes on our roads, eradicating roads that lead nowhere, placing docks properly on the map, removing rivers that make no sense as well, etc. There’s an impossible amount of small adjustments that happen as a player generates a map, allowing for the ruleset to be expandable and dynamic (if you know me, that’s my favorite word). Ultimately, I think it’s not that relevant to list all these small but yet significant adjustments and expand upon the decision making. But to summarize, the fact remains that we’ve put a lot of emphasis on generating maps that make sense and work well.

Mark: Conversely, is there anything about Fallen Gods that’s more fun, easier, or more interesting than the prior Wormwood Studios projects?

James: Pretty much about everything. It’s not just that the engine that’s different, but also the implementation is less constrained this time around. On our earlier projects, there were challenges from a fake 3rd dimension and we were limited by not getting necessary animations and backgrounds. Here, we have been able to create something more alive and fluid with fewer assets.

Mark: What aspect of your work on Fallen Gods are you proudest of so far?

James: That would easily be the way the game during its generation, places the docks on our map. Each map has four docks, in addition to towns, where you can depart or arrive on a ship, and we wanted to, one, make sure those docks are distributed in a useful way, and, two, name them Northdock, Eastdock, etc. so the player can easily identify them. All of that was hard.

First, the game determines a list of hexes that are able to have a dock and are not within a town’s reach. Even if that would seem that this would be very few hexes, it’s still about 100 of them (at the very least) on every generation. Then it splits those 100 into four significant groups based on their angle from the center of the map, and places those four groups that have a certain median angle, as close to the cardinal directions (NORTH, WEST, EAST, SOUTH) as possible. If it fails, then it attempts to find a diagonal approach or an approach that makes sense. All these steps took an insane amount of work to be coded.

After that, the docks are named. Naming the docks when they’re cardinals is easy, but naming them in the fallback diagonal approach is not as easy as you’d think it to be. But luckily I was able to get past that obstacle and now, no matter what, we always have properly placed docks and properly named docks, as the game’s algorithms for both generation and naming have been finetuned!