In the middle of this era, a time before which we can hardly remember, there is an already long-since established scourge on the ways of indie game design in appearance. A sprite is a piece of a 2D game that defines how a character or obstacle or something looks. Of course for non-first-person games you very often want that. But in more recent years there has been a creeping bane of graphics that involves thousands of people mysteriously converging towards drawing a common character pixel art design group that involves putting in the least amount of thought possible.
Welcome to the Malmy Sprite.
This design is an infectious way that graphical design in a lot of indie video games just automatically behaves, and I am sorry to admit that it's not just the really small-scale obscure ones. Some actual paid indie games of bigger-name value have this problem too, I'm sure of it.
Before I go ahead with the rest of this, I just need to acknowledge something to do with my unrelated previous blog post. This month I posted an article about how YouTube gave us a pretty big win for as long as we want to screenshot videos and they don't make a stupid reversion, but this was tragically dampered just a few hours later that very same day I had publicly celebrated a good circumstance when I found that YouTube, while I was looking away, removed a video search feature. They added new similar options to their mostly terrible search, but it morbidly took the form of a replacement because suddenly "sort by upload date" was gone. I'm seeing that there are bad YouTube changes in late 2025 and early 2026 - on the minute level, I'm not qualified to discuss things that are bigger - and it's probably going to come down to me detailing and documenting these things further in a future article. Now let's get back to the current post.
A Malmy Sprite is a kind of sprite that involves extremely simplistic chains of causality in drawing a protagonist character and other characters in a game, and people who are awake to this atrocity recognize that it is very low effort, "lazy".
That's not why I hate it. Not the laziness, that is. If drawing an entire sheet of Symphony of the Night sprites for one character all by yourself - beautiful animations for every action and all - took just two minutes, that would give me no cause for bother at all. Actually the malmy sprite itself I drew and posted up there took about two minutes on an unfamiliar program that I hate once I finally begun to get used to that part of Krita. My friends have said to me in real life before when I showed them this that I "whipped that up pretty quick". There is no whipping up. In pixel art, this is the bare bones of putting pixels into some shape of a character. In my opinion it's much worse than stick figures. What pisses me off about Malmy Sprites is their stupid personality, and that personality is how it got my choice of words to title it on the name of Malmy... "Malmy" is a disapproving name I came up with for a widespread kind of person. A kind of person who permeates The Internet and often the indie game development community a lot.
There are lots of different people in the world, and lots of different personalities that they can have inside. But one of the problems that plagues humanity is when you get an archetype of person, and then that archetype is characterized by exhibiting the same five insufferable mannerisms and sensibilities, and then suddenly on The Internet they are everywhere.
I've not done well as a person with high standards to be born into a world that has so many endemic garbage traits inhabiting his trade of choice, making small-organization video games. Sadly I'm a game developer who is perpetually annoyed with other game developers. But allow me to describe your average Malmy real quick. A Malmy is a person who talks a certain way, trying to be cute and pretending to have some sort of sweetness to them, often making stupid jokes like "hi back, I'm dad!" and "I don't want to divide 1 by 3, I want the whole pi!" while being rather socially fragile and perhaps often toxic especially when challenged on something, all wrapped up in a skin of standoffish, hair-trigger tension. Like an egg that will explode if you pick it up. I also find much of what they say incredibly unhelpful. Because of the overlap in person and frequent creation and how much I hate the graphics that this post is about, the name of the sprite archetype that we're discussing here got me to name it after people who are Malmies.
Fortunately, just seeing a Malmy Sprite doesn't immediately bring up PTSD about talking to these people, but it does create a specific feeling. A "hey, this character has the most unlikable aura and personality ever" type of deal. But the idea is that Malmies are highly likely to be the kind of person who would draw their characters in an original 2D video game like that. If you want to embarrass the word "original".
It's worth pointing out as sharp and blunt as possible that this has nothing to do with what old video games by AAA studios - even in 1988 - actually had to do or typically looked like. When there's an indie homebrew on a console like the NES or Gameboy that shows up on my YouTube subscriptions from the Tool Assisted Speedrun channel, I can spot the fact that it's made by indies from a kilometer away.
Sure, there are plenty of developers who don't make Malmy Sprites now - thank god - but going on your average free game portal expedition you are going to find lots of them. At other times, you also see a lot of over the top "HEY, THIS IS AN INDIE GAME! YOU ARE PLAYING INDIE RIGHT NOW!" characteristics anyway. I'm seeing a lot of conformity, ironically. I mean conformity in a much bigger scale of indie games than this. That is something though for another discussion on some other day.
Malmy Sprites, in my theory, happen because pixel art is about using the most basic units of graphics, and people unconsciously start drawing their characters like that because they didn't take time to think about what they wanted to draw, and there you go. Imagine you want to draw a house with just matchsticks, and for some reason you only have six. Copy that scenario plenty of times, and you're going to see a lot of generic squares below a lot of generic triangles. For some people the answer to personally avoiding this could lie in simply buying more match sticks and not settling for six.
It wasn't always this way. I'll show you a simple yet particularly good character design from the Flash days.
His name is Fancy Pants Man. He's a vector-based Flash game protagonist in a beautiful scenic dreamlike world that's hard to forget, and he is full of smooth, elaborately-done animation sheets. This guy was made by Brad Borne, and this game, Fancy Pants Adventures, was extremely popular with plenty of people and myself in 2006. His look is actually kind of iconic. And the series was very creative. Sadly, much of its archive is bugged and hard to access now.
It's worth pointing out that The Fancy Pants Adventures games were exceptional for their time and couldn't be challenged by too many other Flash games, but other Flash games had their merits too. Platform Racing 2, jmtb02, and Nitrome had many fairly stand-out graphical worlds and characters in them, along with hundreds of others, though hilariously games like Ball Revamped and Trapped 4 got by on the practice of kitting out basic geometric shapes.
The key here was diversity. The options involved with Malmy Sprites are a lot slimmer.
Malmy Sprites come in various uninteresting forms.
You've got the most basic one, the featureless cat one, and the noodley tall one, and a few others! Ross Scott of Game Dungeon actually pointed out in his Yuppie Psycho video - a review of a game which is guilty of propagating Malmy Sprites - that there's a recurring appearance of "this character". Though he didn't critically go anywhere below the surface of this issue. That was in 2024. I don't think he even knows how annoying this is.
Some of the readers here will probably interpret this as me being bossy, but I am not trying to tell people that they should be free to do less. I'm saying that we should be doing more. If being a bit judgy and negative is what it takes, so be it. Do we really want the other way? Just thousands of people making video games that play differently and are either good, bland, or bad, but also all look the same?
As a game developer, I commit to creating characters that don't invoke this frustrating and unlikable character personality. I said before that I don't hate Malmy Sprites on the account of their easy workload, and that is important to recognize here because I design characters that aren't very difficult or artsy for games all the time. For the use of this post I'll make one up right now.
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It's pretty basic, and I won't be using this one in a game, and it's pretty surreal for your average dude to implement it, but it has some kind of identity to it. At least it's not douchey on the eyes and it doesn't go "look at me I am a little man and I have one dot for that eye and another dot for that other eye and these are my arms and legs." Like I said. We should collectively do things that are different. I'll be the one indie dev to make sprites that are quite as goofy and goofy in the same way as that one. I make some pretty easy to draw characters, but in my opinion as their creator - fine. But Malmies? Never. I would never draw these horrible things for a serious project end result without any sort of parody or social commentary unless somebody ordered me to. Sadly, one year I actually was in a team with that order.
There was one time, in the beginning of a long project, secretly, not even in a place where people are expected or likely to go, where I unwittingly drew this curse and put him in a testing dead-end Easter Egg area. But I realized my mistake eventually and got really mad with myself and replaced him. He wasn't even OK with me as a relic or a placeholder.
Really I think it just proved my point. I drew the stupid thing that way because I wasn't thinking about what I was doing. It's how I expect a lot of other people were operating when their case of Malmy disease happened.
It is not laziness in artistic or pixel art skill that bothers me the most here. It's the psychological laziness that gets to me. I think we could get a lot more variety if people put something from themselves into their character art. But the same picture happens instead. I'm aware of how there are various bad ways I could be coming across in this post. My goal isn't to try to restrict what people can do creatively. What I want is for you and other people to put as much creativity into their indie gamedev work as they are capable. Sure I make games that I like, but I also want to play them. It's lonely to be the only person making small adorable games that you truly love.
If you're an indie developer, there's no way I can stop you from drawing these Malmy things and putting them in your product if that's really how you want to draw them. But if I've burst a balloon here, and you realize you'd rather do something else, just think about how creative you're being next time you draw a VG protagonist. Maybe draw something on paper as a draft. And if you find yourself with very little room on your digital canvas to make something more fleshed out, please just resize the game's average tile resolution so you do have enough room to draw a more imaginative sprite.