Retro-inspired games continue to evolve beyond simple nostalgia, with many developers now focusing on recreating not just the look of classic titles, but the feel as well. From movement and combat to pacing and player feedback, it's like going back in time. Saint Slayer: Spear of Sacrilege is one such project, leaning heavily into the design philosophy of early NES-era action games while still adapting to modern expectations around accessibility and player choice.

In this interview, we spoke with the team at Lillymo shares how they approached building Saint Slayer: Spear of Sacrilege, from its pixel art pipeline and animation techniques to its GameMaker-based production workflow.

Saint Slayer: Spear of Sacrilege leans heavily into an authentic NES-era aesthetic. What drew you to that specific visual direction, and how early was that decision made in development?

Barry Johnson, Programmer, Designer, and Co-Owner of Lillymo: We decided right from the jump that we wanted to make a game that looks, sounds, and feels like an NES game. We had a number of sources of inspiration for Saint Slayer, but the main one was Castlevania (1) on NES. This meant leaning into having jumps with committed momentum, knockback, and other staples of action titles at the time.

The game captures the look and feel of classic 8-bit titles while still feeling modern. How do you strike that balance between authenticity and contemporary expectations?

Barry Johnson: We have four difficulty settings ranging from “Easy” to “Classic”. These will impact your in-game health, knock-back, lives, enemies, bosses, and availability of the orb shop. The in-game orb shop allows players to spend orbs they find on things like health items, upgrades, familiars, and more.

You will also be able to use these orbs to purchase a revival from a game over, unless you are playing on “Classic” difficulty, where game overs are final. Saint Slayer was designed around being a two-button game; however, we allow for button remapping and/or expanding the number of buttons used for those who prefer to.

Can you walk us through your pixel art pipeline—from initial concept sketches to finalized in-game assets?

Joshua Gossage, Art, Game Design, and Level Design: There’s really no need to do any sketches or even form blocking on smaller pixel art if you are strong enough with it.  Barry and I worked closely on this project day by day. We typically would discuss how we wanted to handle something, then I would create the art for it and hand it to him with any instructions on how best to apply it. Then we would see how it looked and make adjustments if needed. That worked well for us for the majority of the project.

 Are you working within strict technical limitations (like palette or resolution constraints) to emulate NES hardware, or are you taking a more flexible, modern approach?

Joshua Gossage: Saint Slayer is NES-Esque in vibe and feeling, but really doesn’t follow any hardware limitations that existed for that console. There are some rules to the general structure of the art design, but they were self-imposed to keep the game having a particular style. Sprites are monochromatic with a limited color shade count to keep them consistent.

Enemy groupings utilize color swaps, but they are done manually for the majority of sprites because our enemy tiers have some different behaviors and occasional altered animations. Bosses and special NPCs are allowed other colors. Rudiger is the only orange element in the game aside from other friendly sprites, such as boxes and familiars that won’t harm you. It’s about visual coding for players to intuit naturally as they progress. More colorful sprites are more important.

What tools and software are central to your pixel art workflow for characters, environments, and animations?

Joshua Gossage:  I’m a bit of an odd bird on this because I prefer a mixed approach. I use an older school pixel dedicated software called Graphicsgale for my pixel art. I prefer all my presets and thousands of hours of muscle memory to keep me from spending too much time elsewhere. I’m left-handed, but I spend a lot of time drawing pixel art on the fly with a mouse with my right hand. But I also use an XP-PEN drawing tablet sometimes when I’m doing larger sprites and really planning to not be interrupted while I’m at it for a while.

Animation plays a huge role in selling retro-style action. How do you approach animating characters and enemies to feel responsive while staying within a limited pixel framework?

Joshua Gossage: When it comes to retro animations, especially, you need to remember that you don’t have the luxury of showing actual form in full fluid motion. Focus on the large form, keep in mind how many frames you have, and block out some key frame intervals. Make sure you sell your punches and landings really strongly. Then approach your tween frames, keeping your thinking on how fast the form will be moving.

What does your overall development pipeline look like—from design and art to implementation and testing?

Joshua Gossage: Discuss goals > Art > Implement > Playtest > Repeat. We utilized a large “mega” document shared with the entire team that held our plotted concepts, ideas, and task lists. To-do lists keep us from forgetting important things that were left unfinished. Mockups, clearly labeled spritesheets, and detailed explanations.

Audio is another key part of the experience, especially with an 8-bit-inspired soundtrack. How does your audio pipeline integrate with gameplay and visuals?

Barry Johnson: The Composer and Sound Designer on Saint Slayer (Josh Davis), works on all of the songs and sounds you hear in the game. He comes up with his ideas from seeing the stages come together, then we implement them into our project and playtest for sound and feel.

Performance is typically less of a constraint for retro-style games, but were there still technical challenges you had to solve during development?

Barry Johnson: Yes, there are always many technical challenges to overcome when making a game, regardless of resolution. I also tried to work within self-imposed limitations with how I handled many elements of the game. It was a balance of allowing for some new innovations and elements that you would not be able to see on the NES, while still creating something that feels like it is from that era.

Looking back, what were the biggest challenges in committing fully to a retro pixel art style across the entire project?

Barry Johnson: Retro-style pixel art projects are our wheelhouse. This will be our seventh title in this style. Something I keep as a hard rule for this is keeping art at 1:1 across the project, including things like fonts. So elements like GUI/menus and in-game text can be limited in their space on screen. Something else that I try to really get right is movement, and making sure that everything looks good and is moving smoothly, no odd-looking movement timing, or weirdness with rounding/sub-pixel movement.

For developers interested in creating retro-inspired games today, what are the most important lessons you’ve learned about art direction and production?

Joshua Gossage: You need to play the old-school games if you want to be able to make something that feels like those old classics. They had to rely on their creativity to overcome hardware restrictions. We don’t have those barriers now, so you really need to understand them properly to be able to emulate the vibe and feel and understand them well enough to do something similar, but build on it so it isn’t purely copy-catting.

Finally, are there any behind-the-scenes materials, such as sprite sheets, animation breakdowns, or in-engine tools, you can share to help developers better understand your workflow?

Joshua Gossage: With pixel art, you don’t often have to worry about how much space you are taking up these days, so just focus on keeping your spritesheets and tilesheets clean enough that you can easily capture them with whatever the draw tool you are using is. We use Gamemaker, so it is quite easy to highlight a sprite from the sheet and then draw it in place on the layers we want. Typically, with retro games, you will have a standardized tile size or block size. Our standard for Saint Slayer was 16x16 pixel blocks. So I tried to keep everything on the sheets spread out by 8 or 16 pixels, so everything was very easy to space out on a grid and easy to avoid overlaps when using the draw tools in the engine.

Decide as a team what your system should be. I kept our assets per stage on individual sheets. Stage 1 assets on a stage 1 sheet, stage 2 on a sheet just for them, and so on. This kept things easy for us to work on just that stage without digging around too much looking for things.

Sometimes I would provide a mockup to show how to assemble a grouping of assets, and sometimes I would just create that cluster of pieces or tiles in an easy-to-grab segment to make it easier for stage construction.

Lillymo Games, Indie Game Studio, Creators of Saint Slayer

Interview conducted by David Jagneaux