Ricardo Juchem

I’m always happy when I can post some game art without UI elements, so here are backgrounds/locations from General Interactive’s Chinatown Detective Agency, drawn by Ricardo Juchem. 

I really like Ricardo’s story. He’s been a web designer for most of his career, but eventually got drawn into pixel art and started posting his first works in 2016, quite prolifically so in the #Pixel_Dailies community on Twitter (here is my archive of his works from that year). 

His dedication to studying art on a daily basis is seriously inspiring. By tackling on everything from digital painting to 3D, he assimilates general art knowledge and brings it back to pixel art. This way, Ricardo’s works quickly rose from simple vignettes to elaborate scenes, culminating in a career switch to pixel art in 2017. He got involved in multiple game development projects, first a cyberpunk point-and-click adventure Future Flashback, and as announced this year, Chinatown Detective Agency, which is inspired by the world-exploring series Carmen Sandiego.

Chinatown Detective Agency is one of the most popular games on IndieDB right now and is in the running for the annual Top 100 Indies of 2019 award. If you enjoy the project as much as I do, you can help the game by voting here (no registration required, just a click is needed).