My secret santa for Pixelglade! I tried to deliver on his wishes for anime characters, nature imagery, outer space, retro gaming, and solarpunk themes.

The palette used is kawaii16, choosen for being a good portraits and looking kinda PC98-ish. Somehow works pretty well for greenery as well despite only having one green in it! (the piece techincally has 17 colors because of the transparency between the screens)
 

I know basically no japanese, but I looked up the wikipedia pages for "solar panel" and "noahs ark", switched langague to japanes, and slammed together what I assumed to be the two correct halves. Sources indicate that I may have done it somewhat correctly!

The Ship on the title screen was first modeled in Blender. I made a tiny render and converted it to the palette, but the ship on the final piece was drawn from scratch using the render as reference.

The starmap screen almost had a much more boring border, untill I saw some screenshots of PC98 games and saw how ridicolosly cool they made the user interfaces, and hastily upgraded it before handing it in.

The scariest part of drawing this was the portraits, as I'm not usually good with faces larger than 16x16, especially if they're supposed to be pretty. So, first step before I started working on the gift proper was to do a bunch of fan art of anime girls. Perhaps one day I'll be brave enough to share those studies.

And I used Bitmap Font Writer to quickly write and update text for the dialog boxes. Shoutouts to Grimm_Dingo for reccomending it to me!