I was wondering how do you draw adventure game pixel backgrounds. It seems with conventional drawing software that its nearly impossible (I am a photoshop user). I am trying to create images like those for the VGA Kings Quest games or games like Star Trek Judgement Rites. Any info/software recommendations are appreciated.

That's pixel art... You basically just use paint or other paint-clones out there with nice add-ons. There are no real short cuts to pixel art, just practice :S

You might want to google "pixel art tutorials", nice results there.

I have done that but all I get is that new-age pixel art and isometric tutorials. Nothing really aimed at the stuff like back in the good old days. I was hoping someone had specific info.

I guess what I really want to do can be seen by this image:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/star-trek-25th-anniversary/screenshots/gameShotId,62407

That's just a "style" of pixel art. Limit your palette size to a certain amount of colours and the end result will look a lot like that. I did a bit of googling but I can't find specific information on the style you're looking for.

IMHO I think you just need to practice what you can learn from modern tutorials and translate the information into your own look.

Theres a couple of things you need:

Corel Paint Shop Pro
An artistic eye (preferably your own, or you can steal one from a grave somewhere)
An understanding of old-school graphics design


The old games looked the way they do not only because they were pixel art, but because they had fewer colors to work with. To get the old-school look, you need to limit your color palette as well.

That's where Paint Shop comes in. Create color palettes (you can in Paint, but you can't save out multiple palettes and it makes things a pain) and use an exclusive palette for each object.

You may choose to do 8 or 16 colors for each sprite, and a 32 color palette for the backgrounds. Whatever you choose is fine, because "technically" you aren't actually working with that limitation. However, by limiting the size of your color palettes you will be able to get that "old-school" feel.

Also, low resolution. These games often ran in 320x240 or less. If you run in a higher resolution, turn off anti-aliasing and any texture filtering and scale your images so that they look blocky (or just use blitting instead of textures, such as SDL or DirectDraw 7).

I hope this helps get you started.