Interview: Lina Torres on Crafting Personality in Tiny Sprites

We sat down with Lina Torres, the pixel artist behind several successful indie social games, to talk about workflow, constraints, and the surprising power of a single pixel.

“There’s magic in holding constraints close; they force you into bold choices.” — Lina Torres

Q: How do you start a character at 16x16?

Lina: I begin by blocking a silhouette and deciding on a single readable feature. For social games the feature should be visible at distance: a hat, a shoulder pad, a high-contrast accessory. Then I test quickly at scale. If the player is unrecognizable on a phone screen, I simplify again. It’s iterative sculpting, not decoration.

Q: What’s your palette strategy?

Lina: I typically work with 8–10 colors for a character. You need a base, two shades, a highlight, and 2–3 accents for accessories. The accents are important for identity — one hot color can make a character legible at a glance. I also build a neutral background palette to ensure contrast in-game.

Q: Any rules for animation?

Lina: Yes — three frames for movement is a great target. One neutral, one forward-lean, one full-step. For key interactions, make the important pixel movement exaggerated. Players are making snap judgments, and a bold pixel change reads better than subtlety.

Q: How do you collaborate with engineers?

Lina: Communication is the biggest asset. I provide annotated spritesheets with collision boxes, frame timings, and LOD (level-of-detail) notes. When engineers prototype, we quickly test in real networked scenarios so I can tweak timing and visibility based on actual latency and interpolation.

Q: Accessibility considerations?

Lina: Color-blind modes are essential. I recommend adding shape-based markers in addition to color accents. Also consider motion-reduced modes — some players prefer no blinking or flashing. Small teams sometimes underestimate these options, but they matter for your player base.

Q: Favorite accidental discovery?

Lina: Once we added a one-pixel “sweat” animation on eliminated players just to add humor. It stuck — players used it as a bonding signal and it became part of the game’s joke vocabulary. Tiny emotional gestures like that make games feel handcrafted.

Q: Tools and pipeline?

Lina: I use Aseprite for most tasks, exporting to indexed PNGs and generating sprite atlases with a small script. Version control for art is a must; using LFS or dedicated asset storage prevents confusion. I also keep a living style guide in Figma for UI-scale references.

Q: Advice for new pixel artists?

Lina: Focus on read-time. Make assets and animations that communicate in a glance. Practice by reducing existing sprites: take a 64x64 sprite and shrink it until it still reads. That exercise teaches economy of stroke. Also, ship things rough and iterate — artists learn fastest when they see their work in context.

Closing thoughts

Lina: Art for social games must prioritize shared clarity over personal flourish. The best pixel choices are those that make people laugh, argue, and come back. That’s the goal: create visuals that enhance the social conversation, not that distract from it.