| Project | Pyxel |
|---|---|
| Type | Pixel Art App |
| Platform | Cross-platform (tested on OS X) |
| Team | 1 Hobbyist |
| Role | Everything |
| Inspiration | The original Game Boy and the Game Boy Color palettes |
| Language | Python |
| Framework | Qt |
| Design Pattern | Event Driven Architecture |
| Tools | Inkscape, an original Game Boy as template |
| Year | 2012 |
| Repository | github.com/poksme/Pyxel |
Pyxel Perfect
Pyxel is a Pixel Art drawing application.
It emulates the original Game Boy limitations, look & feel. In order to recreate this feeling, the drawing area had to be limited to Game Boy's original resolution of 160 by 144 pixels.
To make the experience as close as possible to the original, Nintendo's classic title scrolling has been remade using Qt animation.
An original Game Boy has been scanned and used as template for the background drawn in vectorial (Inkscape). The vectorial assets made pixel perfect window resizing possible. Furthermore, when resizing, the window will only resize using powers of 2 in order to avoid half pixels on the drawing area.
Pyxel Art
Pyxel has been designed to be a complete «creative limitation» application. It is minimalist by design and aims at driving creativity by limiting the user:
- Only 1 brush
- Only 4 colors
- Only 4 brush sizes
The recommended drawing process comes in two steps:
- Draw a picture using Game Boy's original color palette (4 shades of green).
- Change the color palette to one of the 12 GameBoy Color palettes.
This process tends to recall the color palette swap you could force when loading an original Game Boy game in a Game Boy Color.