ZLG's MaloDance Emote
My community unlocked this emote during Subathon 2026! I leaned on the skills I learned from the last year or so of pixel art practice and commissions to take on two birds with one stone.
Bird One: Community Satisfaction
It's quite simple, really. Despite my Twitch stream having a good number of emotes, they're just kinda silly and general in their usage. I needed some that were purpose-built. This emote's job is explicitly dancing and vibing. It can be used for hype moments or good music during stream.
The Malo Mart dance from Zelda: Twilight Princess is a classic goofball routine that is just the right kind of weird. It was the right choice, everyone was in favor.
Bird Two: Testing my Skill
The second prong of this project was to really put my skills to the test. I thought to myself, "Twitch allows emotes up to 60 frames. What can I do that needs that many frames?" That thought was left to percolate while I figured out how the emote would be made.
There are many characters I could've chosen to do the dance, but I chose the most obvious from Twilight Princess: the stuck-up shopkeeper in Hyrule Castle Town. He looks down on Link for looking shabby, but is eventually forced to dance as he serves you later in the game, after Malo purchases the shop. The irony is rich. One of my favorite scenarios in the Zelda series.
What better way to pay homage to Zelda with another 2-for-1, though? The Minish Cap had a great art style for its format. Despite that game's sprites being larger than the 28×28 constraints I work with for Twitch emotes, I found a way to put the Malo Mart guy into those dimensions! The torso had to be shortened a little to do it, but I'm largely pleased with the result.
I was aiming for the Minish Cap style due to its focus on outlines with a hue to them. The pastels often used in that game were inspirational to some degree, but the Malo Mart guy's outfit used quite a number of varied hues that were hard to capture in such a small sprite. I like the style for its ability to convey shape and color together with smart selective outlining. In the end, my piece deviates from Capcom's style, but if you look closely I think you can see its influence.
Production
Building it was harder than you'd think. Making the face was fairly straight-forward, as were the hands. Getting the motion correct in the legs (very minimal in Twilight Princess, actually!) and the sway in the arms was quite trying. Once I got one side correct, I did essentially mirror it for the return trip, with some modifications to ensure it looks correct.
One of the best parts of pixel art is its re-usability. I try to build my pieces
out of smaller, reusable pieces where I can, because even rebuilding them
isn't so bad, if you have the pieces you built it with. ProMotionNG makes that
simple by letting me turn any selection into a brush, to store in any .pmp
file, or in its global brush storage. It's an essential part of my workflow now.
It's also the original purpose of pixel art: reusable game assets. So, this guy's hands and arms were copied and mirrored a little to shorten production, because the most challenging was yet to come...
The Malo Mart guy has a rotating horn on his cap. To make this look good, the horn should do a full rotation during the animation, so it loops correctly and is seamless. Doing this in 60 frames is quite a challenge!
First, I divided the task into smaller, more manageable segments. I chopped it in half, twice, which gave me 15 frames per "quadrant" of the horn's rotation. If I could produce a 15-frame animation that looks like a smooth quarter-turn, then I should be able to keep whatever pixel steps I used, establish some key frames, and make a smooth, consistent animation.
That task took quite a while! The emote sat there, unfinished, for at least a month or two. Rendering a shiny, rotating horn in pixel art isn't easy. But eventually, I gathered the gumption to grind it out, do the work, and refine every last pixel. And damn, look at it! It's one of the smoothest animations I've ever done. The rotating horn is still pleasant to watch, even after obsessing over the final version for two or three days before I released it.
It wouldn't have happened without my awesome subscribers! Thanks a lot to the REAL Game Z!
This is an emote that you can use on Twitch when you subscribe to my channel.