This is the second post in my series on how I’m learning Pixel Art.

It’s rare I have a side project last longer than 21 days, but learning how to draw has gotten me hooked. It’s fun.

I logged my first 21 days in another post:

Revisting Bite

When I first started with pixel art, I drew the following image of a caterpillar on a leaf:

I decided to re-draw the image with some of the things I learned.

Examining the image

My lines weren’t ‘pixel-perfect’ - I eye-balled pretty much everything, and you can notice some jagged edges against the background - I could clean those up with additional passes.

I also think I made the half-leaf shading too subtle. Say what you will about the original 16x16 Bite - you knew where the lighting was coming from. This one has more of a diffused light - it matches the new environment, but not the original.

I also made the colors more muted and slightly more grey-red than the original, which had more of a cartoonish orange hue. I’m not entirely sure how I feel about that change - the orange one had a bit of fun melancholy whimsy but this one probably veers more towards melancholy.

Regardless - I think it turned out pretty good!

My approach

Before I drew the final leaf, I drew a couple of variants of leaves to practice different styles and try to figure out a bit more precisely what a leaf was about.

I ended up with my green leaf, turned it orange, and added a scene to it to match the vibes that Bite had.

Funnily enough - Bite v2 took me almost the same exact amount of time as the original Bite!

Improving my human anatomy - torsos

In Adoration, I couldn’t figure out how to draw the torso so I effectively abandoned it altogether so I could finish the picture without figuring out the technical execution of it.

I effectively cut out most of the body with the framing and left it un-detailed since conceptually it worked for the robot character:

But, that isn’t a trick I can rely on forever. It was a miss on my execution and I wanted to learn and do better.

This time, I focused exclusively on- drawing a torso to figure out how to do better.

I did a lot better this time. The lower neck and chest make sense, as does the attachment to the neck and the rotation of the arm. The torso lacks detail but given the limited palette and pixels, I think it does a good enough job of suggesting the abdomen.

I’m not actually sure why I did better on the anatomy this go-around - it’s not like I did more research or had more knowledge - I just tried again. Perhaps the higher resolution helped, or maybe it was because I started with the shape and planes first and didn’t use layers so it helped ensure everything felt connected - I’ll have to dig in more.

The head area doesn’t have the detail you’d expect, but that’s OK since this was an exercise on torsos, not faces.

I made it a mid-jump shot so there was a narrative reason for having a picture of just a chest - it felt weird otherwise.

I framed it in a Polaroid format and added a bit of story around it since it wasn’t an interesting otherwise. I’m particularly happy with the polaroid streak in the picture, though I’m not sure if it’ll get confused as some random ray of light.

I also tried some dithering on the side for the sand and wave detail for the water that made it a little nicer than just flat.

Practicing surfaces

It’s amazing how one little white mark makes the thing look shiny. I particularly like the texture I managed to get for the fruit body itself - it really does look like the inside of an apple!

Lining the shading with more intermediate colors made it smooth out quite well - it looks less like pixel art though - a bit at the boundary.

Overall, I really like how the apple turned out!

Practicing animals

I’ve been having a bit of a hard time figuring out what to draw, so I gave myself a constraint: use only 4 colors and draw an animal.

I drew a pig with 3 shades of pink and the color black for the eyes. I was pretty happy with how it came out - particularly the eyes and the wrinkles. Constraints breed creativity, I suppose!

I didn’t want to spend a lot of time figuring out a background for it, but I wanted to still tell an ambiguous story, and this was the easiest thing to add.

Practicing w/ an Apple Pencil

I bought an Apple Pencil for my iPad and a copy of Pixquare.

It’s a bit harder to use vs. a mouse and keyboard, but I managed to draw something. I find it easier to do human faces / figures with it, but harder to do backgrounds and more rigid objects.

The cool thing is there’s a ‘time-lapse’ feature that lets you share the image’s entire process!

Practicing detail

I wanted to practice adding detail. I often start with block of color and then I sometimes blank on what to do to make it worth looking at.

My favorite part of this picture is the water coming down the wall.

Practicing Faces

I tried practicing stylized faces today.

I think I’m getting better, though hair is still challenging to give a real sense of volume that makes sense. But parts of it seem good - like the right half of the hair in the top center.

I’m circling something I can do more consistently.

It’s kind of cool how 1-2 pixels changes the look and feel of the face so completely.

Drawing what I want

I had the thought “I should draw a goat” and then I made it into a reality after an hour or two.

That’s a really cool feeling.

It’s not perfect, but it’s what I was envisioning.

I could spend more time making the horn shading smoother and less bulky, make the grooves wrap around the full horn, improve the shading along the nose ridge and forehead, and clean up how the mouth follows the jawline, but I also don’t need to because I’m kind of satisfied with how this turned out.

Just in time for Halloween!

Intro

As I was making my game Dwell, I realized that my lack of art skills was going to hold me back from making the games to the quality I wanted. I was relying on AI assets that I hand-edited, but it wasn’t going to be enough: AI just isn’t that good or consistent.

So, like all of my problems: I decided to solve it the hard way and learn how to art.

Using a copy of Aseprite I’ve had for a while, I’ve started drawing pixel art, starting with a 16x16 canvas, practicing various techniques, and hopefully working my way up to 128x128 (and beyond)!

I also picked up a book, Art Fundamentals, on recommendation from a friend.

This page contains some of the drawings I’ve made as I’m learning- like a learning log! I’m looking forward to looking back one day and seeing how far I can get.

September 2026

I decided to start with random doodles and sketches - each row above is a day of doodles from the initial three days, starting 09/25/2026.

I just wanted to draw my wife reading her e-book - she’s kind of a book monster! Practicing lighting up her face with the glow of her phone was an interesting exercise and made me appreciate shading a lot more than just shading a flat circle.

I sometimes find it hard to turn my brain off and enjoy the present. I often calculate what might go wrong and plan for worst-case scenarios. Cold Swim takes one of my happy places, a forest lake, and illustrates one possible outcome - a brief moment of anxiety come to life.

When there’s an entry, the natural reaction is - what’s beyond it? What mysteries lie on the other side?

Then I thought to myself: entries work both ways. What’s the mystery on this side?

I used Beyond the Gate to explore the idea while practicing lighting.

I’ve always been a fan of art with hidden, enormous, incomprehensible monsters that aren’t immediately obvious. For Star-Eater, I wanted to evoke a sense of awe while practicing achieving a sense of scale in a composition.

Bite started as a practice objects I was drawing. I had drawn a leaf, found it boring, and then decided to add by subtracting: I punched a bite-sized hole into it. I then added the caterpillar because it felt cute and the whole scene started feeling a bit melancholy - a leaf and lonely caterpillar drifting through the air.

Peek is a reminder that if you can see it, it can see you.

I was practicing trying to achieve a sense of depth and decided there was no better way than to draw a hole. Once I got to the bottom, I stared at it for a while and remembered that sightlines work both ways.

I used Last Place to explore manipulating proportions to provide a sense of distance. By the time I realized I had accidentally used a 48x16px canvas, I was already done.

My initial attempt had the podium in the distance but that suggested the person hadn’t finished the race yet.

Moving the podium let him finish the race - but what then?

The word aloha can be used as both a greeting and a farewell.

I made Aloha? to explore the ambiguity. Is the sun setting or rising? What is that in the distance? Is it coming or going? Is it friendly or not?

Learning art is a daunting task. I have concepts and ideas and what I want to achieve in my head, but lack the technical skill to get there.

I rely on the knowledge of others - through writing and videos - but there’s so much ahead, it’s almost blinding.

Guidance can point the way, but it doesn’t guarantee you’ll reach your destination.

Learning art has been fun. It’s daunting, and there’s so much to learn, but the end result of one day being able to express my thoughts and ideas with visual clarity is very motivating.

It still feels like drowning, though.

October 2026

As I practice composition, I’m learning that even small differences in position have a large impact. Moving the person just a few pixels left or right greatly changes the level of tension and ambiguity in the scene.

Across started as a picnic scene to work with pastels, and quickly became an exercise in proxemics. It’s a reminder that you often can’t tell how a situation will evolve with the information you start with.

Putting things you create out into the world is a bit scary. Even the things you think turned out pretty OK - you don’t know what you don’t know, and I know just a few days into this that my technique and execution has a lot of flaws.

I know mentally and practically very few, if any people, will actually see any of this, but the nerve is still there. Even with framing, people will always pass their own judgements.

Luckily, software engineering has a culture of putting it out there, so it’s not a blocker.

So, I’ll submit anyways.

Playing around with Saturation, not Value, and being cognizant of light source lets me make things that look billowing and fluffy.

There’s so many things I can visualize with this new understanding.

The clouds didn’t come out how I wanted - I wanted to get a fog-like effect. I also made they way too chunky and I don’t really have any idea of where my light is coming from here.

The clouds obscure the jungle. As I get better technically, maybe I’ll be able to see more of the canopy.

A bigger canvas affords me more space for details, which is nice, but the larger surface area means further distance from ‘done’.

I found myself getting impatient, copy-pasting once I had a pattern instead of drawing it pixel by pixel. Is that cheating? Does it still count as ‘art’ or ‘drawing’ if you don’t place every brush-stroke, every pixel?

I think my impatience comes from my lack of skill. I see what I want to create. It just doesn’t come out the way I envision it.

My wife's car, a bright red Subaru, often goes weeks without a bath, building up a cakey dust from miles of highway driving.

As I was practicing color coordination and drawing what was initially a curtain, I thought the combination of reds I picked looked a lot like the dust on her car, so I drew this instead.

Even a bit of dust can provide a great canvas.

Perspective is hard.

I was originally drawing a grocery store aisle and I didn’t have enough pixels to do a deep depth without things collapsing in immediately on the vanishing point. So, I switched things up and decided to attempt to draw a box with parallel edges, shadows, and colored shading to imply depth.

I almost abandoned the exercise completely, but hanged in there. I think the box came out OK for what it is, but the door still seems very flat.

I get why people like art now. It’s an act of pure creation, limited only by your technical skills and imagination. Nobody is telling me what to draw, or why to draw it. I just do it because I feel like it.

I used to think drawing was boring - it’s why I never made it past random doodles in the past. But now I think it’s another way to tell stories, and narratives - to impart ideas and feelings and communicate.

It’s a shame it took me decades to realize that it’s a way to build worlds.

An end is always there, whether I perceive it or not.

I might be far from it. It might take great effort to get there. I might reach it suddenly or gradually. But there is an end.

Whether what comes before is good, bad, fulfilling, or shallow - the end itself doesn’t determine that.

The next chapter in the Art Fundamentals book is Anatomy. I figured I should take a stab at it before I read it so I can understand what I'm doing wrong with mistakes under my belt.

I intended on making a happy face but I lack skill - my result was nothing short of terrifying - I hope I never run into this person in an alley.

There's something about the eyes - it stares back - less Peek, more Gaze.

I wanted to draw a well, but I kind of lost the plot afterwards.

I tried two variants - one with a person and the other without. I think both have their merits, but neither really felt particularly interesting and I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do with either.

Compared to the first anglerfish I drew, this one ended up way better. It feels a bit more three-dimensional, though I didn’t pay much attention to the shading.

My next anglerfish will be quite a catch.

A 64x64 canvas size really affords me the ability to do more dimensional drawings. It takes me way longer, though. This is the first time I had to use layers to keep track of stuff.

I did discover that Aseprite supports blend modes like overlay and darken, so making shadows and other lighting effects is going to be way easier.

Though I still am making many mistakes - misaligned perspective, muddy depth indicators, missing shadows, sloppy line-work, I feel like I’m starting to get a grip on this and improving!

I wasn’t actually intending on drawing Next.

While I was clearing the canvas to start a new picture, I dragged the edge of Cracking across the screen to wipe it. It created a horizontal bar that looked like a railing and I thought to myself - ‘hm, that looks neat - what could that railing be used for’?

Sometimes you just don’t know what’s next.

I took a first stab at a usable game sprite: Eyebat.

The animation is a bit janky, but the level of granular control I now have is excellent. My prior AI-driven workflow would quickly degrade as I tried generating and animating assets. As I get better I’ll be able to make much more consistent sprites and animations and create things I actually want instead of AI approximations.

I originally was just making a close-up of a sword on a 64x64 canvas, but after it encompassed the screen at a harsh angle, I started feeling a sense of doom from the picture. I thought that was a good sign, so I expanded the canvas and turned it into a guillotine.

It took me a bit to get the blade right - I initially put it on the wrong way and had to redo all the shading, and I kept painting over the wrong layers - it’s easy to lose track.

I really like how this turned out - particularly the detail on the wood.

A flock of crows passed by overhead while I was at the park with my wife. We both watched as the crows flew by - it was serene and peaceful after a stressful day. After we got home, she painted the scene she saw with watercolors while I drew it with Aseprite - the first time we drew together.

Who knows where they’re going? I’m no bird-o-logist - not yet, anyways.

I started this after being interrupted in the early morning by a malfunctioning alarm and I couldn’t fall asleep. I wanted to capture the vibe of being interrupted.

Unfortunately - I just couldn’t draw it the way I wanted.

The lack of pixels on the 64x64 canvas just made it really hard to detail the awkward angle without it getting mushy or unreadable - specifically on the eyes - a single pixel throws off the proportion, and my desired angle of the face just wasn’t compatible. Because I couldn’t get the eyes to work, I didn’t bother trying to get the rest of the face to work.

As far as the rest of it goes - I think I did a decent job of the overall positioning and proportions - the face has the dimensions of a face.

As I work on improving my drawing sklls, my ability to communicate is improving.

But, I’ve also discovered: not all ideas are worth exploring.

A 128x128 canvas definitely gives more space for things I couldn’t do as effectively on the smaller canvases - edge anti-aliasing w/ intermediate colors, more texture and details, and particularly curves.

Faces in particular seem to benefit a lot since a lot of the face seems to just be planes that you have to figure out how to visually separate and imply depth - a lot harder when you have 4px vs. 16px in any given spot.

Something is weird with my shading. I can’t quite put my finger on it.'I need to isolate it, so I need to go back to basics.

What am I missing? The light source? The direction? The curvature of the surface? The hue? Tint? Value? Am I just sloppy with the placement? Is it the shading at all? Is it the pixels? Am I just not anti-aliasing when I can? Is it the clutter from the shell?

I think I’ve spent way too long looking at ladybugs.

I finished the chapter on Anatomy. It’s increased my confidence to attempt human figures but it’s still hard, particularly at this resolution. Things like fingers get mushy, and I find it hard to use the details effectively.

My favorite part of this picture is actually the leg - I had drawn the shape on my first attempt and it was the first time I thought “wow, this turned out exactly how I envisioned it”.

As for the background - I used the technique from Peak to create the valley here by layering in different shades of green to simulate distance. I think it worked out.

Fun fact - this was originally a picture of a girl diving. I couldn’t get the arms for the dive right so I rotated the picture and made it about rock climbing instead.

I wanted to try a hand at a more stylized face so I made a portrait of a blue-haired woman. Afterwards, I didn’t want to spend the next couple of hours drawing a body or creating a scene, so I just turned it into an identity card to suit the presentation. At work I often deal with identity verification and authentication, and this piece ended up with an accidental timely relevancy.

I had started with the eyes by creating a sheet with variations - the first few were doofy, and then droopy, and then some mix in-between. I finally got the ‘grumpy’ vibe I was going for by adding a very harsh narrow angle and leveraging the eyelashes / eyebrows.

When I moved on to the hair, my original attempt ended up very geometric, which read well but looked blocky - like a helmet instead of hair. I wanted something a touch more realistic, so I made it more naturally curved, which made it look distinct from the original.

That made it click - there’s a difference between accurate representation and character. One reads more realistic, but the other reads more memorable, and I can’t say which is better.

No matter how hard life gets, it’s always been oddly comforting to me to know that the rest of the world moves on unaffected. I wanted to capture that sentiment in an image.

I used a different technique for this picture - instead of starting with color blobs / shapes, I started with black and white lines. It ended up working really well in ensuring my lines were consistent and gave me small sections to fill in with details, which made going the entire 192x192 scene fairly manageable.

I really like how it turned out, though it took me a few hours.

Wow, hands are hard. I knew it was going to be, but it was somehow even more challenging. There’s perspective, angles, proportion, value separation, shading, shadows, colors.

Towards the pinky it got really muddy so I had to cheat and add a dark outline. It also has some proportion issues - without çarving or shading some of the fingers read a bit too thick. I didn’t even attempt to add the surface detail like veins, wrinkles and the red tone that real fingers have.

Still - I’m pretty happy at how it came out for a first attempt at a close-up of a hand. When I first started drawing it I didn’t think I’d end up with a readable result, but it came out legible!

I decided to do a simpler picture after two more complicated ones. This one has the feel of my earlier 16x16 pictures, but the 192x192 resolution lets me have more silhouettes and details.

It’s funny - the more resolution I have, the more resolution I feel I need. My initial 16x16 images were symbolic representations but I thought they were pretty good. Now, at 192x192, I’m wondering to myself if I need to move to 256x256.

My gut tells me I don’t need to - yet. I think I need to work on texture and detail - using the strength of 16x16 symbolism to represent things but as part of a larger 192x192 picture - a best of both worlds kind of deal.

At what point is a picture done? When is it fit for consumption? For archiving? For sharing? How do you even tell?

What if I don’t actually need to draw more than a pixel?

Let 10/13/2026 mark the day where I discovered the power of scribbles!

I couldn’t really think about what to draw next, so I just started scribbling and eventually a shape appeared. I blobbed it with some color and it turned into a picture!

Now that I have some techniques under my belt, I’m able to actually turn them into recognizable images!

Drawing is so fun.

Drawing is like a bottomless pit of stuff to learn and create. There’s so many different paths and techniques and styles.

I tried the scribble technique with this one, and then thought to myself: what if I scribbled with colors? So, I did!

I really love how the wood details started to take shape and meld with each other. The more I randomly drew with the browns, the more the shape and depth and detail emerged.

The end result made it actually look a bit like wood - this may be the first picture I’ve actually had texture with.

This is the first one I worked on for more than a day - I kept trying to abandon it because I couldn’t get the face how I wanted it.

I’m glad I stuck in there.

This is also the first one where I paid more attention to the lighting. It’s still not natural, but it’s much more lighting-centric than my other drawings.

This started off as a scribble 'space’ scene with a asteroid belt, and when I tried adding lighting to it, it ended up looking like a block of wood.

I was even more surprised at how the grey I used reacted to the lighting - it felt quite harmonious.

I think the technique ended up with a stylized detail that could work well if incorporated into a larger scene.

In my third exploration of texture, I tried going for a furry detail here. I think it kind of worked out - I was a bit sloppy with my placement but it definitely looks furry.

Though again, looks can be deceiving!

I still find it pretty difficult to draw people.

I had to change the arm to a robot arm because I couldn’t figure out how to make it seem like a human arm. I also couldn’t figure out the torso, but it kind of works out OK within the context of the picture because it’s a robot now.

The proportion and pose isn’t quite aligned - I could move the arm slightly more forward to align with the head more, and adjust the proportion of the upper arm with the lower arm and torso.

The hair didn’t quite turn out how I wanted, but at the same time - it kind of also did? I can’t quite put my finger on it. I like how the eyes and mouth and nose turned out, though.

But - these are relatively minor adjustments I’m more confident in making.

I saw a pixel art in the past with a similar head pose and thought “wow, I wish I could draw something like that” - who knew I’d kind of get there.

Looking back after 21 days

2026-10-17

I made it way further than I thought I would in just ~21 days. I don’t actually plan for my side projects to take that long - it kind of just naturally happens regularly.

My other “21-day” projects like Palette, Light, etc. would eventually devolve into me losing interest, but that hasn’t happened yet with learning pixel art - my interest and excitement is still quite high.

I think I’m going to continue pursuing it, though perhaps in a different post or format.

My original goal

I don’t think I accomplished my original goal of making game sprites. I made one - Eyebat - but I found drawing standalone pictures a lot more fun. They tell a story and let you impart a thought or feeling, but sprites have to be incorporated into a larger piece of work to achieve the same effect.

That doesn’t mean I can’t make sprites, though - I think a lot of the things I learned are transferable to sprite-making, though I imagine there’s also nuanced challenges that come with sprites I haven’t encountered yet.

My learnings

I learned a lot and have so much more to go. Art techniques like composition, planes, perspective, colors, lighting, anatomy - it’s just the very beginning. I need to keep practicing.

I found I enjoyed drawing about and exercising certain concepts - unknown unknowns, continuity beyond what’s present, differences in scale, the power of recognition, observation, uncertainty, sufficiency, implied relationships, and control.

Unlike my day-job which is all about ensuring every risk is managed and controlled, I found art a lot more flexible: even mistakes and accidents led to very enjoyable outcomes.

Parting thoughts

This whole experience has taught me to pay more attention to the world around me. I find I’m noticing more than I did before when I was focused exclusively on a goal. The world is meant to be experienced and I’ve kind of just been missing it.

I’m not stopping at Day 21! I’m logging Day 22+ here:

I recently released a 21-day side project - a top-down 2D tile-based action RPG game I called Dwell.

I’ll have a technical breakdown in another post - but this post is about how I approached the direction and design from a creative perspective.

The rest of this post contains spoilers.

Keep your eyes on the prize

Role playing games are excellent at focusing the player’s attention.

Interfaces, objectives, enemies, rewards, equipment, progression systems, and level layouts all help establish a hierarchy of importance. In an action RPG, that hierarchy encourages moving forward.

Progress is the goal - leveling up, collecting new items, upgrading equipment, obtaining new abilities, unlocking new areas.

Action RPGs give players many reasons to treat an environment as an area to pass through. The environment provides variety as you progress - a blue slime in water, a red slime in lava - while still functioning mechanically as a transitory space: just a stepping stone to an even more exciting place with even more powerful rewards.

Oftentimes, the focus is more on the indicators pointing out the destination rather than the journey.

Is the adventure already here?

Dwell is a game that I designed to explore a specific premise: what happens if your adventure is already in front of you?

It still uses the language of a conventional RPG: it has a path to follow, weapons to choose from, enemies to fight, abilities to gain, and an ending to reach.

At the same time, I added another layer that is much less interested in whether the player is making progress or whether the player even notices at all. That layer only really becomes visible if the player spends their time and attention in places that they would otherwise rush through to get to their goal.

Walkthrough

If you haven’t played it yet - feel free. It takes only a couple of minutes to complete the mission. If not, here’s the overall walkthrough.

Like every game, the player starts on the title screen, with the player character sitting besides a glowing campfire, ready to start the adventure.

You arrive on the island, follow a path to a cave, kill some bandits, gain some new abilities, and return to your boat.

Then, the game ends.

Like every game, the player ends up back on the title screen.

The attentive player

This is where most players’ journey with Dwell ends. The game is over, and nothing requires them to go through it again.

For some, I hope it leaves a sense of disproportion. The game was just a bit too short. The credits were jarringly more emotional and nostalgic than the tiny streamlined experience they just went through. The final word - DWELL - was just a bit too assertive.

Maybe it’ll raise the question: ‘is that it?”

Back on the title screen - the world feels more alive. Something has changed - the player just might not remember what.

In a second play-through, instead of “what am I supposed to do?”, the player can ask a different question: “what didn’t I notice?”

The Design

Reflecting the theme from the very beginning

I designed the Title Screen to establish what Dwell was about from the first moment - patience and attention leading to an experience not found by proceeding.

Here, I intentionally framed the screen in near pitch-black night, with the light flickering to the side, revealing only a slight glimpse of something more at the bare edges.

A player who rushes through and clicks “Start Adventure” jumps right into the game.

However, a patient player who waits long enough for the day can see the world wake up as the title song plays - a gentle pastoral melody.

Designing the map

The first attempt

The first map I made for Dwell was just meant to be a nice walk into the forest where the enemies were - it was literally a straight line.

It felt a bit empty so I added an ‘easter egg’ to reward going off the main path: a bench you could sit on and hear music.

As I sat there watching the wind move through the grass, I realized: why don’t I make this game about the things you normally wouldn’t experience if you stayed focused on progressing?

The second attempt

I intentionally made this area feel like a starting tutorial zone - somewhere that you would normally rush past and never think twice about. There’s a pleasant ambience, non-threatening wildlife, and rabbits that you can just run past towards your destination.

I also made the path deliberately skip and de-emphasize the things you can interact with. In a typical RPG, paths often lead to points of interest. Here, it routes past and around some of the things that might make the experience more interesting.

The break in the path near the bench was one of the first visual signals I added that suggested: stop. But the next section of the path beckons - always visible and ready.

Variations

I tried a few variations, including removing the loop and even adding a bridge to create a direct route from the camp to the cave. None of the changes felt quite right because the player would skip large parts of the island entirely.

The deeper experiences in Dwell come from taking the time to pay closer attention to areas you’re already in. It’s not quite fair to ask people to dwell in a place they’ve barely seen, and putting the adventures in what feels like ’another unvisited area’ simply turns it into a destination. Going somewhere new is itself a form of progression - that’s not dwelling, that’s exploration.

The cave

The second area, the cave, wasn’t always a cave. It was initially a forest where I wanted to add as much depth as the start.

It didn’t work thematically, especially coming from the open island.

Instead, I opted for a cave - constrained, dark, mechanical, linear. It contrasted well with the open area you just came from.

That’s not to say there isn’t ambience in it. Water drips from the top of the cave, the sounds reverberates, bugs crawl on the ground, the bandits play cards and eat food.

It just isn’t as detailed or as deep - it has a purely instrumental role: to house the bandits. You enter the cave, you fight them, and you leave. There’s little reason to remain afterwards - it was designed to perform a single purpose, and the experience is quickly exhausted.

Designing around attention

One of the main challenges with the idea of building a game around noticing was that I didn’t want paying attention to become another explicit task.

It would have been easy to add a journal containing objectives such as “watch the sunset,” “find the turtle,” or “listen for the wolf.” That would make the more subtle parts of the world easier to discover, but it would also change their function. The player would be noticing them because the game had already told them they were important.

Instead, I tried to let things happen without announcing them. I was less interested in hiding conventional secrets than in allowing things to exist without the goal of being discovered by the player.

Temporal exploration

The game world itself is very small. The main map is about 70 tiles wide and 60 tiles tall, and the player can cross it in about fifteen seconds. There isn’t much geography to discover.

After less than a minute, the player can understand the basic layout: the pond, the cave, the campfire, the flower field, the trees, and the paths between them.

Part of the usefulness of that constraint is centered around the ability to provide variation - how do you make the world worth engaging in if it becomes repetitive?

That gave me a different way to think about exploration. Normally, exploration means moving farther to find a new place. In Dwell, I made it so exploration means remaining in the same place long enough for it to become different. Most of the variation comes from allowing the same places to change over time.

The environment

The environment is what makes Dwell work well. Small things that might normally exist in isolation interact with each other to enable moments that deepen the experience.

Weather, wind, lighting, day-night cycles, trees, grass, animal behavior, and smoke all overlap, subtly or dramatically changing a location over time. Together, they make the same place capable of revealing different things over time.

The same place viewed attentively across time can feel entirely different. A field of flowers might have butterflies during the day, but when night falls lightning bugs break up the darkness. The grassy plains may be lush green one day but turn brown and flammable after a week without rain.

I wanted these overlapping interactions to be allowed to exist without the game insisting that the player see them.

Flora and fauna

When the player is focused on completing their objective, the world moves by them in a flash. The player who stands still to pay attention will notice that the world itself is moving around them.

Wind moves the grass and leaves. Plants bob on the surface of the lake. Trees shed leaves that drift through the air. Clouds idly pass by overhead. Animals hop, fly, preen, nibble, dive, and croak. Shadows stretch and shrink as the day opens and closes.

Sound

Listening reveals more, too: Leaves rustle in the wind. Frogs croak at night. Ducklings chirp in the day.

The soundscape changes depending on the time of day and weather. The liveliness of animals during the day dies down in the evening, replaced with an echoing emptiness broken only by the occasional croak.

In Dwell, I was intentional about making sure each sound originated from a specific creature on the map - even if you can’t engage with them.

Sometimes, at night, you hear the howl of a wolf. It’s easy to assume the environmental sounds only exist to provide ambience. Few will discover that it’s actually coming from a wolf already living on the edge of the map.

From most places, the player can’t see it at all. There is one position from which it is just barely visible. Yet, it’s there, and it exists, and it howls whether or not the player ever finds it.

The same is true for other sounds - ducks, birds, frogs, crickets. Every sound originates from somewhere.

Choosing how to engage

Acting peacefully

Waiting doesn’t have to mean doing nothing. I didn’t design Dwell to be a screensaver.

I added a few activities into the game that give the player things to do while remaining in the world. They can fish, skip stones, and do other things that hold their attention without moving them towards the objective.

I designed the fishing mini-game to feel like actually reeling something in. Rapidly alternating Q and E while the fish struggles against you feels like the digital equivalent of wrestling with “the big one.”

Acting violently

I didn’t want to create a game where combat is punished, nor a place where it’s the sole source of rewarding moments.

I was more interested in allowing the result of an action to remain present instead of cleaning the scene as soon as the action was complete. The point of Dwell is attention, and attention can reveal both the pleasant effects of peaceful interactions and the aftermath of more violent ones.

That’s why I made the violence unsanitized. Killing a duck in water, for example, causes blood to spread out and stain the surrounding water red.

A player moving quickly and conventionally experiences combat mostly as an immediate sequence of attacks, blocks, damage, and death - UI ticks, health bar changes, and experience gained.

A player who stays in the area sees that sequence become part of the environment - a different form of experience. Corpses, given time, attract flies and later maggots. They may even attract other creatures drawn by the scent of blood.

It’s experience gained, but not the kind measured by a bar.

A few of my favorite little moments

I filled Dwell with ‘little moments’ that offer another kind of experience besides combat. Many are missable, and not all are guaranteed to even show up in any given playthrough. Many won’t even be noticed as they happen.

The illusion of choice

There’s a mundane moment that players won’t find readily. The conditions have to be right: they have to stay on the island long enough for it to rain, they have to walk over to the puddle, and they have to be attentive enough that they notice their reflection.

If the stars do line up, the player gets to stand at a fork in the road staring at their own reflection, only to discover that both paths lead to the same destination.

The imagery fit Dwell perfectly.

The barrel and the book

At the beginning of the game, the barrel is out of sight and reach of the player. Nothing marks its existence. A player who waits long enough, or spends time bird-watching on the lake, will eventually see it float into view slowly, almost imperceptibly.

The patient player can actually open the barrel when it reaches the shore , revealing an item: a book.

If the player takes the book to the campfire, they can sit down and read it.

I didn’t want the book to be some conventional page of text that could be clicked through quickly. I wanted people to experience the feeling of getting lost in a story.

Rather than showing the book’s text to the player, I let the player follow the character’s journey through the book as they become increasingly invested in it. As they read - day turns to night, animals go to sleep. Eventually you glance up and realize your day has already passed by in a flash.

The adventure is here

That was the structure I was trying to build around the original idea. There’s still an adventure that can be completed quickly, but the world is not paced entirely around that completion. Much of it only becomes visible when the player remains somewhere long enough for the place to change.

Dwell is built around a very small space whose depth comes from time, persistence, and overlapping systems rather than from the amount of ground the player can cover.

Experience can come from the same place viewed differently.