Hi! Iʻm Brittany Lindo. I grew up here on O‘ahu and I attended American Renaissance Academy for my high school years. I actually hold a BFA from Chaminade University and came to West O‘ahu for my second degree in General Creative Media and moved towards Game Development. My first degree acted as a foundation base for my journey as a Game Dev and using those tactics in an entirely new field. If I were an artistsʻ tool, I would be a Wacom Desktop Tablet. Its the tool I use for coding, artwork, and even reviewing my documentation on a larger screen. Its the most important tool I own that I use every day and my most special since it was given to me by my art teacher/older brother, Bordin.
The development of the pixel art style in video games follows a trend and the pursuit of realism, however, unlike the blocky polygons of Tomb Raider (Sega, Tomb Raider. 1996), pixel art ages very well even by modern day standards. Mario from the SNES era will always outshine the embarrassing attempt at realism of early Tomb Raider, as while the art style did attempt to advance with newer technology, it gave a less than desirable outcome as the end product. Tech was limited at the time, only a certain amount of pixels per frame were allowed as well as memory in general being notoriously small on the disks and cartridges. So why would someone develop a game with a retro art style like pixel art over polygons? The proof is in the modern market.
The concept of creativity has come a long way. The Old Greeks would call those creative forces muses, other religions referred to them as God. Today people still mostly treat creativity as an aha moment outside the area of influence. However, just by looking at the creative process one can tell, that creativity and creative work is more than just that one "Aha-Moment" (insight). It is clear that generating ideas demands planning and preparation, identifying something of interest like a problem, an opportunity or a challenge, doing research. This then leads to thinking of a solution, allowing time to incubate and iterations before arriving at something “complete.” Students learn that hard work is what makes their ideas come to life and sticktuiveness is what helps them get better.