HomeTetriClimber >
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

The sentences Hi! This is pyxel. is being drawn on the screen 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

The color palettes are changing. 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:

The recommended drawing process comes in two steps:

  1. Draw a picture using Game Boy's original color palette (4 shades of green).
  2. 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.

Trailer