Retro Sketch /
Introducing Retro Sketch

Well, I can't just setup the website that will serve as our development blog and not introduce the software that we've been working on.

I'm a programmer by trade, but an artist by choice. I've dabbled in drawing my whole life, not in any serious way; but recently I started doing some pixel art. I often like to draw on my phone or my tablet, as they are screens that are easily mobile, but I have a problem. That problem is that I'm not happy with the current pixel art programs for mobile. They either don't have serious pixel art tools, or they are clunky. They are also either too pushy with ads, or their artist network (trying to become instagram).

Our next game is going to be a pixel art game, so that means I'm going to be doing a lot of pixel art drawing and animating. Of course I could torture myself and use the existing software that is out there, but what's the fun in that? So we decided, pretty quickly, that we should develop our own pixel art drawing software with the plan to release it to the public as well.

Currently we already have quite a few features built into the software, so I'll try to go through some of them below.

Project panel

The project panel allows you to create new projects, or open/delete previous projects. Here you can also drag and drop an existing PNG image from your computer to open it.

project panel

There are a couple of UI elements that need to be cleaned up here, such as the " " button to the side of width/height. This will be replaced with a lock icon toggle to allow for locking the input ratio.

Drawing view

One of the key things we think about when designing and developing software is simplicity. Not only for the code itself to be streamlined and simple, but also for the user interface to be so as well. We're trying to remove the clutter, but still give all of the advanced features needed to effectively create pixel art and animations.

drawing view

One of the main things we need to clean up in this UI is the tools. There are many common tools that could possibly be combined so that you can swap between them (open box, solid box, open ellipse, solid ellipse, line, etc.). The only issue with this is coming up with a non-intrusive way to swap between the different variants of each compound tool.

Animations

Yes, we've already completed the ground work for animations and you can export animations as .gif files. We also plan on adding support for exporting animations as image sequences so that they can be loaded up into an image packer for game development. We'll maybe consider adding a built-in texture packer in the future, but right now that's not on our list.

Location indicator

As someone looking to make art for a video game, it is sometimes really nice to precisely see what pixel you are on. It's also just nice for drawing in general. For technical artists like myself, we have a bit of an OCD and want to make sure that what we are doing is well aligned.

location indicator

Color picker

We've created a fully functional color picker that can be called up from anywhere as needed in the software. This is done using our special made async loading of UI which we can control through a Lua.

color picker

Color swatch

At any time you can click on any color in the swatch to switch to that color. You can also click and hold on any swatch to replace it with the current color you've picked.

Shape tools

We've got the basic shape tools built in now- line, rectangle, ellipse, filled rectangle, and filled ellipse. These shape tools will lay the foundation for future shapes as needed.

shape tools

Undo & Redo History

Hilariously, other pixel drawing programs tie history to each layer. So you have to click on a layer to undo on that specific layer. That is not something I'm fond of at all. Layer creation should be part of the history so that it's not tied to the layer at all. That being said, we have fully working history for our pixel art program.

undo and redo history

Android support

All of the images and animations I'm showing in this post are done from the desktop, but rest assured, the software is fully up and running on Android and is at parody with the desktop version. Being that we have our own in-house game engine, written in C, we can easily build what we make in it on Android. Below is a picture of the software running on both a phone and a tablet. It supports auto-rotate as well.

Note that we're still working on UI layouts and sizes for Android devices/orientations

undo and redo history

There's so much more!

I'm running out of time for this post, but there is a ton more in the software we've not yet covered. Exporting images and gifs, eraser, brush, color select, color swap, lasso selection, move layer, sorting layers, duplicating layers, and so much more! These are all things already working in the software, we just don't have time to cover them all in this one post.