Oh boy.

There’s this saying that beginnings are difficult, and whoever came up with it had no idea how it is like having to deal with not just one, but two things that will screw with your mind right off the bat.

First is dealing with perspective.
Fortunately, there aren’t really any issues between old SNES games and the modern RPGMaker engine, as they both use pretty much the same perspective by default.
Unfortunately, this perspective, as I have learned isn’t one that pop ups in every day life all that often.

The so-called 3/4 perspective shows objects both from above and from their front side. Neither of them are shown at an angle, meaning that both are in equal proportions to each other. 16 pixel on the top side equal of an object equal 16 pixels on its front side, forming a cube if we were working in three dimensions.

Now here’s the part that’s making things more difficult than they need to be:

A cube looks distinctly not like a cube in this perspective, but like two squares stacked on top of each other. What’s lacking is depth, which needs to be added through other means.

To get a feel for the perspective, I have taken an indoors example from my darling Breath of Fire 2 and simplified the visible sides.

Note that there are no actual cubes or squares. Even the crates in the lower right of the room aren’t, though they are pretty close. There aren’t all that many perfect squares and cubes in reality either, right?
(Many are of direct relation to 16, however. Times two, 32,  e.g. the width and height of the bed’s top side; or half, 8, e.g. the bed’s front height.)

Both sides have to be accounted for when creating surfaces. The lack of depth makes that difficult, especially if one wishes to not just paint 16 by 16 squares all over the place.

So essentially, there are three types of surfaces to account for:
– the floor, which rarely features any elevation
– the front side
– the top side

What we don’t get to see at all, is the bottom and back side of any object.
This makes it hard to properly situate objects or walls in a room by hand. When placing the beds against the back wall, for example, there is no indication letting us know where to put it so there’s no gap between bed and wall. Theoretically we know that it’s up 8 pixel from the floor, as that’s the height of the bed’s front side, but out visual indication cannot be found where we need it to be.

At one point I trying to overcome this problem by using a voxel editor in order to get a feel for things.
This only helps to a certain degree,  as pixel art is about the illusion of depth, not actual 3D models forced onto a 2D plane in an unusual perspective. As far as I can tell, anyway.

The second point is getting the darned lighting right.
Where to put minor highlights, where to put major ones.
Where to shade a lot, where to shade little…

In theory it’s not all that hard:
you imagine where your main source of light is coming from, that’s where it’s the brightest. All surfaces that share the same angle get the same intensity of light, and the more they are turned away from said source of light, the darker they become, the turning point being half-way if the object’s placed sufficiently far away from the light.

But wait, there’s something missing in that equation, scientifically speaking:
light is emitted by a source, makes contact with an object and is reflected by it (and likely partially absorbed), until it loses most of its energy or reaches a capture device of sorts (e.g. the human eye, or a camera). That’s, in principle, how vision works.
But does it play any role at all here?

To be honest, I’m still not entirely sure.

Take a look at the following image (scaled up to 300% of the original size):

It’s obvious that the main source of light comes from above and from the left, most evident on the trees, but also on the roofs. Their right sides receive significantly less light and feature more shade.

Now what I’m still confused about are highlights on smaller surfaces with at least some semblance of volume, namely the pavement and the wall.
Highlights on front surfaces can be found on the top and the left edges, while highlights on floor and top surfaces are confined to the edges on the left and the bottom.
That makes sense if we slightly adjust where the light is coming from and orient it more towards the picture’s south as well.

Alright, fair enough, we know where the light is coming from, so those parts get the most lights.
But is it really just a matter of which surfaces or edges receive the most light that defines these particular highlights, or is there an element of these highlights representing just the perfect angle at which light is reflected to the viewer?

I think there is, but I might be wrong…