Re: Courses and Tutorials

[megaxrock]

Hey there!

As far as courses and tutorials goes, it depends. Personally I am of the opinion that a good tutorial should cover one specific part of the pixel-art process followed by another. What I am saying is that if you are teaching pixel art, focus first on static pixel art and then once that's completely covered, move on onto animations, which is a completely different discipline and requires other skills on top of pixel art to get good. 

The formats I like the most tend to be based around either a solid book or an interactive website. I tend to prefer books because they tend to have a more solid longevity over most websites but having something where the user can go, have a go at the program you're trying to teach them and the website is telling them how to do so would be awesome (perhaps GrafX2 could run on the web provided Emscripten works?) 

There are also other aspects to consider. Like how would you teach palettes, layering or even techniques like dithering to others given that some of them are either really useful or not used as much depending on the platform they're choosing. The ideal approach would be to cover as many of the topics as possible but I suppose it all depends anyway. 

If there's one aspect that you could probably get quite a bit of attention on is if the tutorials also focus on how pixel-art was made for older platforms. The homebrew community is growing and so are the tools used to make them but knowledge on how the limitations of graphics in older machines work is not that common or relatively rare depending on the game. One approach is to use GrafX2, with its myriad of computer/console modes to teach them about it. 

These are just my thoughts though, looking forward to whatever you cook because your work is great :) 

Cheers!

megaxrock.