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'A Merchants Tale' is a game, which was created by me and 2 other fellow students in university. It was part of our Media information science 2 course, where we had to create a game from scratch. The whole game was written in Javascript with use of the Phaser 3 framework.

We wanted to develop a game, which was round based with a focus on economics. The main character is a traveling merchant, who wants to go his way to wealth and social status.

My job, besides developing the game idea, was to give the game its external appearance. And since we had decided on a pixel art style, I used the program 'Aseprite' for this project. I wanted to give the game a retro look, which of course was already supported by the pixel art factor. However, I wanted to push it a little more and set myself a challenge. So I limited my color palette to 8 bits. This meant that in some situations you had to act a little more imaginatively than if you had pixelated with an extensive palette.

Due to the isometric view of the game I have a 128 x 128 pixel square as the base for the objects used on the map. The map itself was layered in 'play ground', 'objects' and a 'foreground frame', which surrounded the whole map and gave dimension to the world.

The HUD had to be quite simplified, without any fancy applications, so that everything had a clear meaning and was able to be identified easily. The characters like the 'shopkeeper' or 'landlord' were pretty fun to create and it was quite a challenge to get the texture of e.g. fur, clothes or armor right.