Retro Inspired: Battle Axe
The colourful and expressive pixels in Battle Axe are a love letter to the arcade classics of the Nineties. We talk to veteran pixel artist Henk Nieborg and Bitmap Bureau’s Mike Tucker about how they brought this passion project to life frame by frame
Henk Nieborg and Mike Tucker explain the influences behind their tribute to classic Nineties action games
“These days there’s not many veteran pixel artists around, especially those that worked on the Mega Drive” Mike Tucker
It’s fair to say that there’s still a love and appreciation of pixel art in contemporary games, many which are rightly considered classics. However, most of these are from developers emulating the 8-bit and 16-bit games they grew up with. What we don’t get as much are works from pixel artists from those eras still active and committed to that aesthetic.
Henk Nieborg is one such veteran, with a career spanning decades from the Amiga to the Mega Drive. After dabbling in 3D graphics, working on titles like Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets and Spyro: A Hero’s Tail,
he was fed up with working in huge teams and went freelance, where his 2D talents could still contribute to mobile and handheld titles.
While those years led to dozens more credits, including Contra 4, Shantae: Risky’s Revenge and Shakedown Hawaii, these were often as small contributions. Henk was pining for a project he could call his own, not done since Lomax on Playstation in 1996. This was when Battle Axe, originally known as Battle Bash,
began to take shape, as a 16-bit fantasy arcade brawler, harking back to Golden Axe, Gauntlet
and Capcom’s arcade titles from the Nineties. Fortunately, the prototypes got the attention of Bitmap Bureau’s design director and programmer Mike Tucker, who had his own idea for a 16-bit game, Mega Drive arena shooter Xeno Crisis.
“I’ve known Henk from many, many years ago, but it was actually his mockups of Battle Bash that convinced us to work with him on Xeno Crisis,”
explains Mike. “These days there’s not many veteran pixel artists around, especially those that worked on the
Mega Drive so we were keen to find someone with that skill set, and still had that enthusiasm as well.”
Xeno Crisis far exceeded its original Kickstarter funding goal, launching in 2019 to considerable success. “I did
90% of the art in that game, and we just worked really well as a team together,” says Henk. “So I already had this idea for Battle Bash, it just felt natural to go back to work with these guys again, and so it turned out as our next project.”
Again, they turned to Kickstarter in early
2020, where the project exceeded its initial goal, allowing them to add a couple of additional modes on top of the core arcade mode. The development has been considerably quick, though that would not be including all the preliminary work and art Henk had done prior to this, not to mention that he was the sole artist. For a tight arcade experience made up of four worlds – albeit with a couple also made up of interior sections that mean even more art – it sounds modest for a modern game, but clocks in about the same time as a typical Nineties arcade game. In any case, it was a massively challenging undertaking for one artist, which Mike estimates was about 5,000 frames of animation.
“The workload was a bit crazy but that was also part of the challenge I think, just to have my complete vision in the game and not having to outsource anything,” says Henk, though in hindsight he also thinks maybe getting a couple other artists would have helped, at least maybe in future projects. “For Battle Axe, it was all about Henk, it’s his baby,” adds Mike. “He’s also got such a distinct style, it’s hard to bring in someone to work with him, so we thought we’d just let him do his thing. It’s nice when an artist has full control over the entire game’s visuals.”
You don’t need to be that attentive to notice just how the colourful pixels of Battle Axe pop with just the 320x224 resolution of the Mega Drive, which still looks great when blown up to HD in widescreen. Both personally believe that is a perfect amount of pixels to work from rather than say a higher 640x480 resolution.
“We have to pixel everything from scratch, so it would be more than twice as much work,” Henk explains. “To have that nice retro feeling we stuck to the 320x224 pixel size screen, and the thing is, because my pixel art is so detailed, it actually still looks good on a high resolution screen. Of course, it’s kind of blocky, but that’s the retro feel for me.”
“I remember that weird era in the late-nineties and early Noughties where 2D games were trying to move to higher resolution, and it was just too much really,” adds Mike. “It’s a lot more work, and really didn’t add much to the visuals, so sticking to that classic resolution that the Neo Geo and Mega Drive used to pump out really helps define the feel and look of the game.”
Indeed, Henk already had his work cut out for him as compared to the side-scrolling brawlers, Battle Axe features eight-way movement that is also reflected in the visuals. This meant drawing even more frames for the same character’s action whereas for a horizontal 2D game an artist needed to animate just one direction and then flip it.
“If you just want to animate a main character, it takes about a month to do all the movements, because you have to create them from scratch from every direction, so you must animate at least in five directions, then flip the other three,” explains Henk. “And that’s also for every little enemy or boss in-game. But the main characters were the most work because you have to add all those movements.”
Of course, that attention to detail for expressive movement is part of Henk’s style. When you see your heroes smashing up enemies with riotous kinetic energy, it’s consciously harking back to the detailed sprite work we haven’t really seen since Capcom and SNK were at their prime in the Nineties, with Metal Slug a particular inspiration.
Another aspect that separates Henk’s pixel art from modern practitioners is that his work really is of a pure pixel mindset, which is to say that every pixel you see in Battle Axe is hand-drawn without any of the filters or post-processing effects indies ‘cheat’ with today. If something looks like there’s light bouncing off it, it’s not a lighting effect but actually hand-drawn. “I think people claim that you render your stuff out and just draw over the top of it,” Mike jokes. “I never pre-render anything!” Henk laughs. “They look
like perfect rotations but I just love to do sprite rotations. I don’t know, I render it in my head and put it on screen, and that’s a fact.”
Battle Axe doesn’t just faithfully look the part of a Nineties arcade game, it sounds it too. There’s the wonderfully booming voiceover announcing the name of each level, when you pick up an item or warn that your character’s close to death’s door. But the even bigger impression is a retro soundtrack from none other than legendary composer Manami Matsumae, whose themes for Mega Man, Dynasty Wars, Mercs and Final Fight meant she could provide an authentic Capcom System-1 arcade sound that the team was after.
While this isn’t Manami Matsumae’s first collaboration with a Western developer, having contributed a few tracks to Shovel Knight, the opportunity came through one of Mike’s past connections. “Going back a few years, I met a guy called Alex Aniel, who was a friend of an artist that we used to work with,” he explains. “Alex runs a record label called Brain Wave and is actually Manami Matsumae’s agent and translator. He asked at some point if we might like to work with one of his artists, so it’s always been in the back of my mind. When Battle Axe came along, it just seemed like a great fit to get Matsumae-san working on the project, as she’s also worked on games like Magic Sword, which has similar medieval themes and hack-and-slash gameplay.”
Of course, what’s also true to form is Battle Axe’s hardcore difficulty, which is incidentally ‘Hard’ by default, although you don’t get much of a pass with ‘Easy’. What’s most punishing is that you have just three lives to get through the game and once they’re gone it’s game over. Although there are ways to upgrade your max health or a chance to pick up items to restore health, a chance to earn extra lives or an option to add more credits isn’t part of the package.
Just as with Bitmap Bureau’s Xeno Crisis, that difficulty is intentional, although at least not as brutal as say Ghosts ’N Goblins. “It’s very old school and to be honest, we don’t really make games for casual players,” says Mike unapologetically. “We want to make games that hark back to that era, but they’re not unfair like they were in the Eighties and Nineties. Sometimes when you play Final Fight, the bosses had so many invincibility frames it just feels like you’re having your credits stolen off you. Our games are tough but fair, so if you put in the hours you will be rewarded.”
Considering a full run can be beaten in under 30 minutes once you’ve mastered it, that’s not too demanding overall as you learn the level layout and get more skilful with repeated plays. For those who manage to defeat the evil sorceress Etheldred at the end, further incentive to replay also comes from the trickier challenge of getting a higher score to not getting hit at all if you’re trying to finish a level with an A or S grade. The chain combo is an especially compelling mechanic borrowed from shoot-’emups where players try to maintain a combo by hitting objects or enemies before the combo gauge breaks and resets.
“The maps actually take that into account so you can keep your combo going,” says Mike. “So even if you hit a fence, that counts towards your combos so I’ve tactically placed barrels or fences, so that you can go from killing one enemy, you might then throw a knife at a barrel over there, which counts as a hit, and that’ll actually progress on to the next enemy to keep your chain going. It’s really fun and satisfying to try and maintain your combo for the whole level!”
In any case, Battle Axe is a true old-school arcade experience that allows Henk’s pure pixel perfect vision for the 16-bit classics to shine like never before. It’s a cut above modern indies that lean either on simpler 8-bit styles or compensate with filters, or worse, mixed resolutions, which goes against the pure old-school flavour Bitmap Bureau is aiming for. There’s an eye for detail and dedication to Henk’s work you don’t really see anymore, though we can only hope other artists will be inspired to take up that challenge and create some more games that we’d love to feature in the magazine.
“It’s very old school and to be honest, we don’t really make games for casual players” Mike Tucker