Art Bible

The pixel art standards for Heavy Debts come from this video. Watch it first. Everything below is mandatory for anything that ships.

My Personal Do's and Don'ts of Pixel art! (How I make pixel art!) by Pixel Overload. Posted by Paste in #art-musts on Mar 4 2026. The stills further down are frames from this video, kept as a quick reference.

The rules

Shading. Shade with form. Never pillow shade or pancake shade.

Outlines. Outline exterior lines only where required. Never outline everything. Four styles are available: coloured outline, no outline, outline outside the sprite, and black outline around everything. Pick one per asset class and stay consistent.

Sprite musts

From #game-prototypes, Mar 3:

• Separate the boobs into their own sprite layer
• Two separate milk fluid sprites: stagnant droplets, and pour with slight frame changes

Tooling

• Aseprite for everything. Post the .aseprite or .ase plus a PNG or GIF export.
• Fizz prototypes minigames in Construct 3 before they get built in Godot.

Open questions

Decide at a meeting, then write the answer here.

1. Canvas sizes. Idles so far are 240x350, 285x356, 307x260, 248x231. Pick a standard per character class.
2. Palette. No shared palette file exists. Export one from Aseprite and attach it here.
3. SFW vs NSFW naming. Paste uses _sfw suffix. Confirm that as the rule.
4. Frame rate for idles. Not written anywhere.

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Reference stills

Frames from the video above, for quick lookup.

Shading: form, not pillow or pancake

Outlines: exterior only when required

The four outline styles