The Idea

Every video game from the NES era started the same way: a title screen, a blinking cursor, and the words "Press Start." With a video game, the adventure begins the moment you decide to play. That insight was the spark behind Your Next Great Adventure — a sermon series about stepping into the life you were made for. As a kid who grew up with the original Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and Super Nintendo, I'd spent seven years waiting for the right project to finally do a retro 8-bit series. This was it.

The Build

It started with a photo of Zilker Park — paddleboarders on Lady Bird Lake, Austin's skyline in the background. That photo was converted into pixel art using Aseprite, a sprite animation tool, with a deliberately limited color and shade palette to stay authentic to the original NES aesthetic. The paddleboarder and birds were keyframed and animated, then a custom pixel art title treatment was built to match. Everything came together in Premiere Pro, where the animation was superimposed onto an actual vintage tube TV — complete with CRT scanline distortion and screen flicker — making it feel like you'd genuinely found an old game cartridge and fired it up.

Then it went physical. Blank NES game shells were sourced, custom labels designed and printed, and ten cartridges were assembled by hand. An actual NES was tracked down from a neighbor. The final video included footage of a cartridge being inserted and the game booting up — because if you're going to commit to the bit, you commit to the bit.

The Output

The system extended across every format the series needed — social media graphics, widescreen message title slides, a podcast cover, weekly message cards, physical NES cartridges, print posters, and a t-shirt. A second teal-based visual set was also produced for a parallel series running simultaneously. The pixel art world built for this project lived everywhere from a 70-foot stage screen to a two-inch game cartridge label.