ZLG - Animated

ZLG's MaloDance Emote

2026-08-03T00:00:00-07:00

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.

Shwack's Creeper Explosion

2026-06-26T00:00:00-07:00

My client approached me one day, asking "hey do you think you could do a Minecraft Creeper exploding?" At first blush, I thought "Well, it's already kind of pixel art, how hard could it be?" Well, it's a bit more complex than that, but I was essentially correct! My rendition is a little more saturated, and has less moss on it.

The big detail to get right in this piece is the smaller bits of smoke. I wanted them to look and feel close to the original game, complete with the multiple shades and going in multiple directions. The creeper itself simply expands a little while blinking before the big BOOM happens, just like it does in-game. I used multiples of the same animation to follow up the big blast, and then scatter tiny smoke pieces at the end.

We were both very happy with the result, and his community enjoyed it as well! The smoothness I think is what stands out the most with this one.

To see this emote in action, visit my client's stream!

Kay's Darth Kissing

2026-05-21T00:00:00-07:00

My client requested an emote for her stream that was Vader-themed and showing affection. I didn't have much to go on, but immediately had an idea. The reference showed Vader holding his hand out with hearts, and my first instinct was to focus on the heart, since Vader's helmet doesn't exactly scream "I'm lovey dovey".

The animation consists of Vader blowing a kiss with his hand, while a heart comes out and throbs as it floats upward. The heart's animation came out really well, and conveys the juxtaposition of Vader's imposing helmet and a silly heart. Another job completed!

This piece tested my ability to work with a monochromatic, complex shape that's shiny. It came out pretty solid, but I didn't quite capture the shininess I was hoping for.

My client's community enjoyed it when they went Affiliate and had emotes ready to go!

To see this emote in action, visit my client's stream!

ZLG's Bonfire Emote

2026-05-14T00:00:00-07:00

After knocking out an emote so quickly for HatBastion and his crew, I had Dark Souls on the mind and was looking for an opportunity to try out palette cycling in an animation. The first inspiration was the central figure of the games: the bonfire. It's on the loading screen, it's your respite against the Hollows, and it could serve as a break or rest time emote for the stream. I thought it was a great idea, so work began!

About Palette Cycling

"What is palette cycling?" one might ask. It's a technique where the pixels in an image don't change, but the assigned colors do. In older games, the graphics use what's called an indexed palette, where colors are stored in a table of numbers, and the image is represented by those color indexes instead. This reduces the space needed to store image data. When you do palette cycling, you're re-assigning the color indexes so that the image displays different colors, usually in a sequence of some kind. It's the animated form of a palette swap!

There are two ways to do this that are most obvious: the first is the repeating palette cycle. That's used in titles like Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, some of the Mega Man games, and more, usually to give the water and lava their dynamic feel, or to make energy weapon shots look otherworldly. The ramp cycles through its colors, and returns to the first color, which is usually much brighter/darker and a different hue.

The second palette cycling type is the mirrored, i.e. it ramps up, and then back down. This gives the colors a glowing, embery feel. Lots of lighting, and some weapon effects use this property, but it's usually used in places like animated tiles to reduce the number of tile updates. It was more present in older games where there was limited space to create a complicated engine or enough assets to achieve the look designers were going for.

Production

I used the mirrored palette cycling technique to build the bonfire emote. I started with a ramp from the deep red to the bright yellow and white, built the emote at its darkest, and then fiddled with the palette in ProMotionNG until it felt like it was a proper palette cycle that gave it the same glow the bonfire has on the loading screen in Dark Souls.

It's important that whatever image editing tool you have allows you to grab an entire selection of colors and re-assign their indexes live, so you can plan your art better. While I use GIMP for digital drawing, it's ill-suited for fine-tuned pixel or palette manipulation despite having extensive other image editing capabilities. ProMotionNG and GraphicsGale can do this sort of palette cycling with ease.

Something I added that other artists might not is two different cycle durations, so it isn't a uniform animation. One is slightly slower than the other, so it gives it more of a dynamic feel. I would have added a third speed to it, but I had trouble getting three variations that didn't feel same-y. I think two is a good compromise.

This is an emote that you can use on Twitch when you subscribe to my channel.

HatBastion's Sleepy Hamster

2026-05-06T00:00:00-07:00

My client approached me looking to make a fun, reusable emote to signify sleepiness. Their community is big on cute, fluffy animals, and a sleepy hamster was the perfect way to go! Before details got sorted out, I had a sketch of the idea ready.

We spent some time deciding on a good pose for him. Midway through, the ears ended up looking "like mushrooms", which I thought was an amusing way to convey what was going on, but I understood and we straightened it out quickly!

In the animation, our hamster boy sighs, a bubble expands quickly, and it (somewhat slower) deflates in time for another breath. It was satisfying to work on something easy to animate and expressive!

In the end, my client and their mod team had no critiques at all and it was a hit in the community! Another awesome piece to bring fun to the screen!

Production of this emote was broadcast live on Twitch, with my client's permission.

This asset was originally animated, and I lack an easy way to watermark it in that form. Thus, only a static thumbnail for now. To see it in action, visit my client's stream.

ZLG's MarcusBOOM Emote

2026-04-20T00:00:00-07:00

Robert... I am Leon Kennedy. BOOM

The full details of this piece are hard to remember, but it mostly boiled down to how much I and fellow Twitch peeps enjoy the roflgator memes, so I tried my hand at making him pixel style. It came out pretty decent!

This is an emote that you can use on Twitch when you subscribe to my channel.

HatBastion's Godzilla Holding a Heart

2025-10-26T00:00:00-07:00

This little guy was a lot of fun to put together! My client was looking for a cute, chubby Godzilla holding a heart for their community to use. I loved the idea, and after we pulled together some references and agreed on a few colors, I started pixel-pushing.

A few iterations were all it took to settle on lizard boi's head shape, tail arrangement, how he's holding the heart, and so on. The hardest part of this piece was figuring out the best way to dither it, to suggest the texture of his scaly skin. That's super hard at this resolution, so I opted to shade the dithering itself, once a good pattern was established. It's a rarely-used technique due to how hard it is to get forms correct, but it worked here.

The way he blinks and opens his mouth also brought a lot of personality to the emote, without a whole lot of rework! Since we ran out of vertical pixels to get a really big RAWR, I went with turning his head back a little bit, and shaded the teeth pixels in-place to give the illusion of depth in limited space.

This asset was originally animated, and I lack an easy way to watermark it in that form. Thus, only a static thumbnail for now. To see it in action, visit my client's stream.

ZLG's Nugget Emote

2025-09-24T00:00:00-07:00

This was one of the "unhinged" emotes that my community wanted, as part of a channel subscription goal. It all started when I was messing around in ProMotionNG on stream, and made something vaguely chicken nugget shaped.

It evolved into quite a funny sight: it dunks itself into a little vat of honey mustard, and wiggles around as it makes a face that could only be described as, uh, sensual, before being lifted out of the vat. If that sounds kinda weird, then I accomplished my job as artist.

The little particles of honey mustard were so satisfying to put together and animate correctly. I was laughing nearly the whole time!

This is an emote that you can use on Twitch when you subscribe to my channel.

ZLG's Zelda II-themed Stream Layout

2025-08-09T00:00:00-07:00

When I received ProMotionNG as a gift, the first thing I wanted to explore was its color bit-depth and tiling capabilities. I was trying to come up with something new to do for my stream, and the first thing that came to mind was a new layout. I wanted to use a game that you don't see represented often in stream layouts, but was a good showcase of the game's flavor and what I personally like about it as a game.

I settled on Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. It's a "black sheep" within its own series, but it is still a good game and concept under the layers of jank and general lack of budget put into the game. I have always wanted Nintendo to come back to this game and give it a proper re-imagining, while remaining more-or-less faithful to the original. They'd done this before with Metroid: Zero Mission and Samus Returns, oddly both from the same franchise. Why shouldn't Zelda II get a modern Metroidvania re-imagining? But I digress.

To some extent, this layout was an experiment, of sorts. I went into this project wanting the answer to a few questions:

Is ProMotionNG something I can lean on for professional work?
Can I leverage my prior Javascript and PICO-8 knowledge to animate in a browser source?
Can I produce layouts that are fun and legible?

Planning

Before I began any brainstorming, I wanted to break down what a stream layout really is and what it typically consists of. This is a broad question to ask, because everyone's stream is a little different. Some people do anonymous follow acknowledgement, others want to shower the follower in attention and welcome them. Some streamers want to show chat on screen, some don't. You get the idea. But, to build a layout, you need to account for these differences in preferences, and make things in a composable or movable way.

I started with a sort of template or blueprint for myself, aligned to a 16x16 grid. The core elements my layout takes into account are:

Logo
Stream Title
Video Capture (i.e. "the content")
Webcam/VTuber
Reactiv Fugi or other VC participant overlay
Stream Goals
Accolades (last subscriber, follower, bit contributor)
Chat Box

From the beginning, I knew I wanted a sort of "town" along the top, the curtained area in the top right, and some representation of every dungeon's tileset, on the way down to Thunderbird. I also wanted contrast in the layout instead of all blue sky, red caves, or darkness.

In the bottom right is where miscellaneous widgets and other things go, so I used that area as level design experimentation, and settled on an underwater ruin -- something that wasn't actually in Zelda II.

Building

ProMotionNG has support for tilesheets, which you can use to build scenes in the editor, much like you would in an actual video game. It takes some finagling with modes, but it's doable.

It was hard for me to keep track of layers when I was building. One idea would lead me down the road to another layer, and I'd come back to another task and screw it up. I was still gaining familiarity with the tool, though, so that's to be expected.

Along the bottom, I gave myself space for the accolades; essentially just acknowledging the last people who contributed to the channel in some way. Some people really like to see their username in these fields, because it gives them a sense of contribution and belonging. I like to promote this, so I wanted each accolade to have its own theme and NPC association. I set up browser sources with both StreamElements and Firebot for the usernames, so some tweaking of fonts and coordinates was necessary.

The lavafall was sort of a cop-out, because there wasn't much room to do something impactful. It wasn't going to lead anywhere, and it's in the space that would be covered when a 16:9 source is visible. So, I made a drop-off with the tiles the game had, and set up a sort of platform that maybe people would be flung into. I mean, there's a giant hole near the King's Tomb, so it's not unlikely for there to be holes all over the place! Hah!

Along the left side, I wanted to have one floor per dungeon style, and culminate in a room containing the Thunderbird and the last piece of the Triforce. On each floor, I wanted the dungeon's primary item, and a notable enemy from that dungeon that would be easy enough to program its animation in Javascript.

Animating

Animating tiny pixel art on a giant 1080p canvas can be done with some crazy, giant GIF or other format, but realistically you should be taking the tiny graphics and doing things with them to animate. Why? It's easier to change if you mess something up, generally, and it can make parts of your workflow repeatable on other assets. Reusability is a virtue in asset production!

In an OBS environment, that means either hooking graphics up to plugins, or a browser source. I wanted something easy to use and share, for example if I made stream layouts for other people in the future. That calls for a browser source. Plugins are nice, but they can change between versions, their compatibility with OBS versions can change over time, and sometimes their developers lose interest in maintaining it or are pushed away from development because of some sort of drama. This makes a self-contained browser source a longer lasting artifact to use -- at least for animations -- and I can reasonably guide someone on extracting it somewhere and adding it to their OBS scene.

Coding

For starters, I do not like Javascript. It's the jankiest language I've ever used, and that's saying something because I also know PHP. Dealing with differences between Firefox and CEF was also a pain in the ass. That said, the <canvas> API isn't the worst thing I've seen. I chose that because the built-in animations API is for the curve-based presets that are also used by CSS. I had odd results when I tried to "just use the Animations API" like current advice indicates. When you're doing pixel-level manipulations or trying to re-create movement from a video game, you need to build the animation like a video game.

So, that's what I did. There's a function you can hook into that's tied to the refresh rate of the canvas element. That's effectively a frame, so I used that as my primary loop event, and built each animated entity as a simple object containing a few fields like x, y, current_frame, and so on. This is close to game development with PICO-8, since Javascript objects and Lua tables are similar. From there, all animation would simply occur in each object's update() method, and track state internally. No more image editing from here, it was all "update this sprite at this time" or "wait this many frames, and do this" in varying forms.

Flying or floating objects were harder to implement, partly due to unfamiliarity with sin() and cos() on an intuitive level. Some day I'll be able to abstract it in my head, but for now it was a lot of tweaking before I got something that resembled the original behavior. The Thunderbird in particular took a lot of iteration before I felt it was more than a static oval path.

Result

I'm largely happy with the result! It was a great learning experience, too. There's a lot of animation on the screen, the colors are bright, it's just solid for classic 4:3 gaming. It's not suited for every game, however, so I paired it with a transluscent Color Source so I can darken the scene for darker content. It retains the same look while giving it a "lights off" feel.

The answer to all three of my questions was "Yes," for what it's worth. :)

DISCLAIMER: The original game tiles belong to Nintendo Co., Ltd. The only ownership expressed here is over the layout design itself and the code used to animate sprites.

Tamago_Bento's Tamagomaki-san and Tamagomaki-neko

2024-12-15T00:00:00-08:00

After a while of streaming, my partner wanted to support me by visiting the stream and participating in chat when she could. My community warmed up to her immediately, and encouraged her to get an avatar, broadcast herself, and so on.

Since my partner likes Japanese folklore and cuisine, a tamago-maki was the perfect object to make a mascot of. This is also a very Japanese thing to do; just look at the imagery used for all sorts of things from PSAs to warning labels. There's a kawaii flavor to things.

In the kawaii spirit, I gave cute pink cheeks to the sushi, and in other versions, it has a mouth. She later came back and asked me for a cat, which I happily obliged and animated for her. My community enjoyed this quite a bit, too!

The weird textures like rice, seaweed, or shaped egg, made these emotes fun projects that tested my skills. We usually shorten it to tamago-san and tamago-cat when talking about them, because it's usually clear it is in fact, sushi, and not just an egg. :)

You can enjoy both of these emotes on Twitch by subscribing to Tamago_Bento's channel. They are only available on my channel for a limited time.