PXLSketch

PXLSketch is the ultimate pixelart creative tool for Playdate!

COMING SOON TO CATALOG, EXCLUSIVE NOW ON ITCH.IO!

This entirely new Playdate experience brings your imagination out to play with creative tools to draw, sketch, and animate. With over 250 PXLs of various shapes and patterns, this is pixelart at the next level. 

PXLSketch is perfect for that next sprite, icon, art piece, typeface, animation, floorplan, pattern or whatever your imagination throws at you!

Participate in daily "PXL Battle" challenges — every day, a new prompt to tackle. Share your daily creations with #pxlsketch #pxlbattles and let your fellow PXLSketchers shower you with accolades.

PXLs

The PXL Carousel is on the right side of the screen and invoked with (B). You also use (B) to cycle through the options - each press rotates the carousel. And it's multitasking friendly; you're free to move the reticle while cycling through PXLs. 

In the PXL Carousel you'll also find the FRAMES and PXLS icons. 

FRAMES lets you switch between frames 1-10 for animation, or just more canvases to play in.  Use the SAVE function within the FRAMES menu to save your current frame before quitting the app to ensure it's there next time.

PXLS will open the PXL Selector, with 7 CATegories. So what's up with these PXLs? Instead of simple black and white blocks, you have over 250 other shapes and patterns to create with, including:

PATTERNS - Who says 1 bit has to be an obstacle? You have 13 different shades of from black to white, plus a few more thrown in for good measure. 

2x2 RECT - Great for thick line work and containers.

4x4 RECT - Great for thin line work and containers.

ROUNDS - Various sized circle-segments to break beyond the rectilinear grid.

ANGLES - 45º angle bricks in black, white, and mid-gray combinations.

TYPE 1 - Alphabet A-Z and Numerals 0-9

TYPE 2 - Inverse Alphabet A-Z and Numerals 0-9

CONTROLS

The controls have been optimized to allow you to keep creating with minimal interruptions from the UI. And the UI gets out of the way while you're drawing, leaving just you and the canvas. 

D-Pad: Move reticle
A: Place PXL
B: PXL Carousel / Select PXL (each press rotates the carousel)
CRANK to Animate! 
SHAKE to Erase!
SCREENSHOT to Share!
SAVE: Use the Save option in PXL Carousel > Frames

SO WHO MADE THIS?

All design and code by Jared Benson, San Francisco-based creative director and lifelong pixel artist (like, since Commodore 64.) Jared is the creator of PXLBOTS since 2005, with an iOS game in the works featuring 1 million generative levels.