I appreciate you approached this from a personal enjoyment perspective and that the pipeline is what really interests you, but isn’t how low resolution pix art

I appreciate you approached this from a personal enjoyment perspective and that the pipeline is what really interests you, but isn’t how low resolution pix art is drawn. It’s a common misconception that low resolution art is just high pixelated equivalents of resolution art but actually it’s more of a caricature that is hand drawn at that resolution (like those cartoonists you see at some tourist hotspots who draw exaggerated portraits). There are some exceptions to this, like Mortal Kombat. But that’s what made that game so distinctive and it’s certainly not a style that would pay off for every game. With regards to 3D modelling, that came really late in the 90s. It was only the last few titles on the popular 16 but platforms that had 3D rendered assets and even there, they’d still be rendered back down to 2D assets and then often manually edited afterwards (eg reducing and changing the colour palette so that larger assets can be loaded and animated via palette swapping rather than wasting expensive video memory on sprite data). But ostensibly retro graphics were hand drawn, often on grid paper, before being encoded on a computer.