I made a free Aseprite plugin for pixel art!
My pixel art Aseprite plugin is available now!
While I was making Ducky's Delivery Service, I found myself manually smoothing out a lot of the jagged lines in my pixel art by painstakingly coloring in each "corner" pixel where two colors met. But I didn't want to spend ages manually doing this for the game's title screen logo text, especially because it's translated into several languages. So back in March, I made a command line program that could do it automatically:
This was fine when I just needed it for a couple of images. Recently, however, I started thinking about how this kind of program could save me a lot of time when drawing big simple sprites like the Ducky's Delivery Service cutscene character portraits. But there's no way I would bother using it if I always had to save the sprite that I was drawing, load it into the edge smoothing program, then load the new image back into my art program.
I use Aseprite to draw pixel art, so the ideal solution for me would be if I could just press a button to automatically apply the edge smoothing right there in Aseprite, without having to save or load or copy or paste anything it all. Fortunately it turns out that you can make plugins in Aseprite, so on Monday I created C.T. Anti-Aliasing for Aseprite!
It's available now on my itch.io page if you're interested! I personally find it most useful for large sprites that either have thick outlines or just a couple of colors (e.g. the main color and the shading color), but I'm looking forward to seeing what other people find it useful for. Here's a quick video of how to use it, although YouTube's video compression might make it difficult to see what's happening:
Let me know if you find it useful for anything! And now that I know I have the power to make Aseprite plugins, I'll see if I can think of any other ways I can save myself time while making pixel art.
I'm still getting my game engine ready for another game
I spent the rest of this week doing the same thing that I was doing last week: going through all of my code and splitting it up into "engine code" that stays the same in every game, and "game code" that changes from game to game. This is a huge amount of work, but it feels good to get more of it done.
This week I finished setting up all of the engine-specific code for controller/keyboard input, 2D sprites, 2D physics, Steam (except for online multiplayer) and save data. But there's still a lot left on my list: characters, UI/menus, levels, level editors, online multiplayer, and all of the basic code for making the game run every frame and rendering it.
I've spent almost two weeks on this so far, and my current plan is to spend another two weeks on it and see how I feel after that. Even if I don't manage to completely finish making all of the engine changes that I want to make, it's still going to make things much easier to use than they were previously.
And that's my week! I basically just sat here and programmed things, and I took a few breaks to play Mega Man 3 and Guilty Gear +R. This might not sound like the most fun way to spend a week, but I really missed programming! For the last few months of Ducky's Delivery Service development, I pretty much just made music and sound effects, talked to lots of translators, recorded trailers, and filled in lots of Steam and Nintendo Switch forms. So it feels great to program things again! I'm sure I'll want another break from programming eventually, but I gotta ride this wave of enthusiasm while it lasts. I hope you have a great week too, and I'll see you next time!