The most important thing I learned in the last couple of months of research was, make things as small as possible and put them in a logical order. When thinking about everything involved in developing your own game, things can get overwhelming quite fast. To lessen this effect, I picked up the following practical questions and started answering them one by one.
What kind of visual style do I want to apply?
You have your isometric games, side scrollers, platformers, RPGs, and probably others. To answer this questions I searched the web looking for the style I like the most. I love the gameplay of a game like Stardew Valley, the artwork of Sea of Stars and I guess Eastward charmed me the most. I guess I am not the biggest fan of the isometric style. perhaps because in my opinion it looks more difficult to work on or maybe it’s just my personal preference. I am not excluding the side scroller idea for a different perspective, but the main part of the game I want to be in the retro non-isometric RPG style gameplay. I am not talking about the story of the game here but I do my story ideas in the back of my head to see if they fit into this style.
What platforms do I want my game to run on?
No idea yet, I want to be flexible later on but start with PC for easy testing. I believe this question is important in answering what tools to be using.
How detailed do I want my game to look like?
Many modern pixel art games run on a resolution of either 320×180 or 640×360 pixels with a tile size of either 16×16 or 32×32 pixels. To anwer this question I looked at some more examples of games and found out the following.
| Game | Resolution | Tile size |
| Stardew Valley | 320×180 | 16×16 (character size 16×32) |
| Eastward | 640×360 | 32×32 (character size 32×64) |
| Sea of Stars | 640×360 | N/A? |
For more detail, I decided to go with the 640×360 which will scale up perfectly to 16:9 aspect ratio screens like full HD (4x) or 4K (6x). I did see there are different solutions for black bars (pillarboxing) on ultrawide screens. I will leave that as a good to know for now.
When looking into Sea of Stars, they combine the top down style with isometric and some say on Reddit they use something like texturing polygons instead of using a tile based system.
What tools do I need at this stage?
Let’s start with pixel art design tools.
Aseprite ($19.99) – The industry standard for drawing tiles, characters and making animations.
Pixquare ($19.99, iPad app) – Not really required, but with this app I can play around when I am on a holiday and I only bring my iPad. At the moment I bought this tool, it was the leading pixel art drawing app on the iPad with support of import and export of Aseprite files (.ase extension). There are others like Resprite (similar UI to Aseprite) and Pixaki (feels more like Procreate).
PixelLab ($220 per year for Tier 2: Pixel Artisan) – I will be using PixelLab a lot for generating tiles, characters, walk animations, effects, pretty much all assets. It integrates seamlessly with Aseprite.
Now let’s have a look at development tools
Unity (free to start with) – For development environments I have looked at tools like RPG Maker, GoDot Engine and Unity. Since I want to improve on my C# I decided to pick Unity since it looks like it can accommodate to all my needs (it was also an easy pick for me after I saw Sea of Stars was created using Unity).
Unity packages – There are a lot of Unity packages and I will be looking over these and listing all the useful ones in a separate post (probably the next one) where I will share my experience and choices when setting up the development environment.
VS Code (free) – I believe the VS 2026 Community edition is bundled with Unity. Since VS Code is more lightweight I will probably be using that for coding.
There are many more questions to answer and tools to explore about music, gameplay, storytelling, etc. but like I said before, I gathered only the minimum requirements in order to start making a first proof of concept as soon as possible.
TL;DR;
Aseprite and PixelLab for asset creation, Unity and VS Code for designing levels and coding the logic. Game resolution of 640×360, tile size of 32×32 and characters of around 32×64.