PixZilla: Retro Reign

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  Player Character Sprite Sheet

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  Player Character Blueprint

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  Player HUD Components

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  Tile Maps

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  Player Projectiles and Hit FX

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  Background Array

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  Parallax Components

Inspiration

Built sprite sheets to add a PixZilla into the Stream Avatars App. Enjoyed the process/result and decided to use these sprite sheets to create a playable character in a game.

What it does

PixZilla: Retro Reign is a pixel art based 2d sidescroller with gameplay unlocked by holding a PixZilla NFT. The current build features 10 levels, 3 game difficulties, 10 varities of enemy ai combatants, 1 playable character with NFT based enhancements, and a time tracking system for speedrunning.

How we built it

Built character, trap, and projectile animations in photoshop. Converted animations to sprite sheets with 150x150 pixel grid size. Extracted sprites in Unreal Engine and created flipbooks for each animation. Created character blueprints, projectile blueprints, trap blueprints, custom animation action states, enhanced input functions for player, paper zd state machines, and enemy ai controllers.

Designed HUD and menu components in photoshop. Built menu widget system in Unreal Engine.

Added Frame Rate limit and adjustable resolution settings.

Designed Tile components in photoshop each tile being a 25x25 grid. Extracted individual tiles for tile maps and added collision data to tiles. Built tile maps from tiles.

Built game mode, game instance, set win condition and built level progression system. Created a multi spline system to control camera movement.

Created static backgrounds and parallax. Initial AI render done using midjourney, midjourney image used as seed image for img2img static diffusion pixel rebuild. (custom model, controlnet, pixel art extension, asymmetric tiling extension, custom lora, custom color palette) Set bg and parallax to update after level completion.

Added game difficulties and created a world timer for speedrunning competition use. Added controller support.

Added NFT authorization via Unreal Engine 5 NFT Authenticator for Theta Network and enhanced player abilities for users with more than 1 PixZilla. Sync'd player name with authorization login.

Designed sound effects on external synth, recorded in FL studio via Edison. Created Sound Cues for each SFX to add to game loop at proper times.

Produced game music in FL Studio, added to level blueprints via sound cue.

Designed game splash and icon. Reduced final package size w/ game optimization techniques

Challenges we ran into

Limitations in stable diffusion render sizes limited the ability to create parallax buildings with the proper level of pixel detail.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating a fun skill based game from scratch with pixel art

What we learned

Blueprint creation, UE5, Stable Diffusion

What's next for PixZilla: Retro Reign

Redesigned level progression system featuring impermanent levels and sublevel streaming. Leaderboard Speedrunning Tournaments New level builds and redesigned base levels. 2d lighting components Remappable Controls Menu controller/keyboard support In-map player powerups

Beta Install Instructions

1. Download the .zip
2. Unzip the folder
3. Navigate to Windows\Engine\Extras\Redist\en-us and run the prerequisites installation (this may take a few minutes)
4. Launch the pixzillaplatformer.exe file and login with these credentials (it is connected to wallet holding 1 PixZilla)

Username: demo Password: hackathon

Built With

• flstudio
• photoshop
• unreal-engine