Five years is a long time. Long enough to learn things. Long enough to unlearn things. Long enough to question every decision you've ever made, at ungodly hours, filled by caffeine to the brim, staring at that damn environment that just won't sit right.

Let me pull back the curtain on what we've learned clawing our way through SacriFire's production.

I'm Adam, art director at Pixelated Milk. I've been with the studio since our last project, Warsaw, where I cut my teeth as a 2D artist. SacriFire? This is my first rodeo as an art director, and oh boy - mistakes have been made. But I want to believe some things were done right as well. My roots are in concept art, visual storytelling, asset work, painting, lighting, photography - the whole visual narrative toolkit.

Here's the kicker: I'm not a pixel artist, not a good one at a very least. Not then, not now, not even after five brutal years on this project. Could I crank out a sprite? Sure. Would it match the quality SacriFire demands and deserves? Absolutely not.

What I have picked up along the way: how to make motion, storytelling, and motion storytelling. How to do level art, or UI, why you should listen to your tech-artist - basically whatever needed doing and learning. That’s an indie gamedev for you, everyone wears every hat until the hats start wearing you.

Gamedev, or any creative process at the scale of a proper JRPG game at least, isn't just vision, idea, your brave individual battling the intrusive thoughts and whatnot. So before you embark on any artistic quest, you need to gather your damn party first.

When we assembled our artists, the reality hit fast: everyone had their own style. All of them talented, of course, all of them different. And you can't build an artistically coherent game when your art team is pulling in five different directions at once.

So before we touched a single asset for the actual project, we did something weird - we stopped. We dedicated time to actually learn from each other: workflows, palettes, animation techniques, the whole arsenal. Our artists cranked out character after character, prop after prop, texture after texture. Then we'd huddle up, lay everything out, and dissect it. What worked? What clashed? Where were we aligned, and where were we hopelessly divergent?

It was tedious. Sometimes soul-crushing. But by the end of that gauntlet? We didn't just have a group of individual artists anymore. We had a party.

When we approached this game in its infancy, we had a rough idea what the game was supposed to be: a character-driven pixel art JRPG, set in the vast city-realm of Antioch. A place blending both fantasy and cyberpunk souls. This has always been the intended core identity of the game. However, having an idea, and knowing how to make it, are two different stories.

The most important realization we came across? Pixel art today is not a necessity, but a choice. So our first dilemma, probably the most conclusive one, was: how can we reimagine a pixel art game fit for the 2020s? Why do it in the first place? 

The answers? We aren’t bound by the old-school 256 color palettes, neither we are restricted to purely flat assets. And we aren’t remotely satisfied by having only two dimensions when we can have three - the larger a number the better, right?

As for why: the sense of “wonder of days gone restored”. Not only as a way to describe the game itself, but also as a feeling we wanted players to feel deeply in their bones, rebuilding the image of the past stories as they are remembered, not necessarily as they were.

Here's where the 3D wizardry comes in. The core concept was simple enough on paper: inject 3D into an otherwise 2D pixel art game to give the camera some breathing room - for a cinematic feeling to flourish, and to add an actual depth to the gameplay itself.

But here's the problem… when you start swinging a camera through 3D space, your precious sprites turn into the flat cardboard cutouts they technically are, and the whole illusion shatters. So we cheat. Aggressively.

We throw FOV tweaks at it. We billboard sprites so they're always facing the camera like creepy portrait eyes. We layer assets with surgical precision so each sprite "sits" in 3D space through sheer contextual trickery - even when you can technically see the deformation if you squint hard enough. Don’t squint please, too hard.

Combat is where this gets really fun. When Ezekiel locks into a grab attack (or gets grabbed himself), the camera whips around so both fighters can square up and trade blows like they're actually facing each other. But peek behind the curtain during the real-time chaos? Those enemy sprites aren't warping nearly as much as the camera angle demands. That's because we're billboarding every sprite in the brawl to align with the camera plane. The environment work? That's all about layering and mini-parallax magic - making the flatness disappear into the 3D space through organic next-asset-context alone.

There’s one trick I refused to use, even though we had multiple headbashing contests about it: depth blur. I’m not going to hate on the idea in other games, but I refuse to accept it in SacriFire. Our artists, as they’ve proven, create these fantastic pixel art sprites and textures for a reason - and that reason is to look fabulous. Blurring them is akin to committing cold-blooded murder on both of your own feet and at least one knee! 

Cinematic depth and spatial environments mean nothing without lighting. Neither does cyberpunk atmosphere, for that matter.

We're not reinventing the wheel here - just spinning it really well. We're using a classic cocktail of baked lighting with ambient occlusion, strategic real-time lights in key areas, and emission maps to sell the glow or light up specific parts of the sprites. But the devil's in the details: depending on what we're trying to pull off in a scene, some sprites need to stay completely unlit. Others need spotlights baked into the light map from outside their actual intended environment.

Figuring out what each scene or object needs is painstaking, pixel-pushing, tedium. But damn, if it isn't worth it…

One more signature move in the SacriFire playbook: atmosphere. Ask any digital painter or level artist worth their salt - nothing sets mood or separates visual planes like volumetric haze. Especially when you're building a moody neon-soaked realm of “where the hell is this?!”

The happy accident? Volumetrics gave us finer control over the "sharpness" bleeding off our pixel art assets. It's like importing edge control and blending tricks from painting. And we can push objects and entire areas forward or backward in the visual hierarchy, since the value gradient from the fog also reinforces our omni-parallax scene structure, making the 3D space feel more real even when it's all smoke and mirrors.

Literally. Smoke and mirrors (oh my beloved “flip X” and “-1 on X scale”).

The how is one thing - but what about the what? Because direction and art aren't just technical exercises; they're the soul of the damn thing. And let me tell you, we've bled for this. Sweated over it. Made mistakes that still haunt us in the shower. But we got there.

The Antioch you'll explore in SacriFire isn't just some generic fantasy cityscape - it's a tasteful chimera stitched together from the bones of real-world history, and there's actual lore backing up why it's this gloriously schizophrenic mess. (No spoilers, though. You'll have to earn those)

Picture this: you're wandering through the medieval European stonework of Ivanstone District one moment, then suddenly you're surrounded by the bleached arches and geometric patterns of Moorish Andalusia in Opus Peaks. Venture into Tundale, and you're threading through stilt houses and bamboo-like forests that feel ripped straight from Southeast Asian agriculture sites. The Ducane family? They've claimed Lanna kingdom architecture as their aesthetic birthright.

The Spire District - where the Church lords over everything - is this beautiful, unsettling marriage of classicist grandeur and art deco edge drenched in the golden light from the Hellgate. And then there's Erebus, the heavenly spirit world, which throws you into a blender of Celtic fairy tale whimsy and... let's just say there are darker corners I'm not going to spoil. You'll find them. They'll find you.

Antioch didn't spring fully formed from our heads like some kind of gamedev Athena. It evolved, mutated, became over a painfully long stretch of development. Early on? Yeah, it was just another city-realm, with just a bit oversized plazas.

But somewhere along the way something clicked. Not without an external help - maestro Thomas Feichtmeir, also known as Cyangmou, and his thorough feedback was invaluable at one pivotal point! Thank you! 

Eventually, we envisioned this sprawling underground metropolis carved into and built atop colossal stalagmites, an entire civilization thriving in a cavern so massive it shouldn't exist. Light pours down through a gargantuan rift in the ceiling above, painting everything below in this fractured, divine glow.

Looking back at how Antioch came together? Honestly, it feels less like a design process and more like a collective fever dream we all somehow agreed to chase.

Look, we're not crossing any finish lines yet - there's still work ahead. But I can say this without flinching: I'm proud as hell of what we've built so far.

Every district in Antioch has clawed out its own visual identity while still feeding into the city's larger story. The noble district? Elegant, pristine gardens, but there's something cold lurking beneath all that gold and glitter. Tundale shifts its vibe depending on which corner you're wandering through - rural one moment, a bit more rave-ish the next (if you can find it).

This city breathes, not only in expressive idles of every NPCs. Buzzing streets thick with life. Golden light spilling from windows. Ominous corners with shady types that make you second-guess your choice of the path. Color bleeding from every crack and crevice. And Erebus? With its shape-shifting biomes? That place is going to mess with you in the best way possible.

I can't wait to watch you dive into this fever dream we've been building.

See you in Antioch!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1661330/SacriFire