Every creature in my picture book The Galactic Zoo started life as a full-colour illustration. This month I wanted to see what they’d look like if they’d escaped into an old video game. So I redrew the residents as 16-bit-style game sprites, each with its own little idle animation.
Same pixels for everyone
The trick with a cast like this is keeping every pixel the same size. If Trevor is drawn with tiny pixels and the Tallanoid with chunky ones, they stop looking like they live in the same world. So every sprite sits on one shared pixel grid. That means you can see exactly who towers over whom: the Tallanoid is enormous, and the Hufflesnuff would fit in your pocket (please don’t put it in your pocket).
Eight frames of personality
Each resident has an eight-frame idle loop: the bit of animation a game character does when you’re not pressing anything. It’s the most important animation there is, because it’s the one you see most. Trevor sways his tail antennae, Errol waves hello, the Technofly waves his glow stick, and the Gasilisk just sort of… drifts.
Three new faces
Three of the residents (the Gasilisk, the Technofly and the Hufflesnuff) haven’t been illustrated in the new book art yet, so I designed their sprites straight from their rhymes. The Gasilisk “floats about” and is “easily moved with a hoover”, so it became a little floating puff of gas. The Hufflesnuff “eats a lot of sugar, then runs about all night”, which tells you everything you need to know.
Where to find them
You’ll spot the sprites around the site now: on the Books page, the Galactic Zoo page, and lurking in a few corners I won’t spoil. Will they end up in an actual game one day? Maybe. For now they just hang about looking shifty.
– TJ (Taylonius)
