Retro Sketch /
Retro Sketch 2.0

We are happy to announce that today we are releasing a major update to Retro Sketch! It is now running on our new in-house Vulkan-based game engine.

Tech Jargon

This uses the newest version of our game engine. It has a newly re-written UI system to allow for more complex UI while using less code and better stability. We also no longer run on OpenGL and now have fully moved to a Vulkan based renderer. This will allow for better shader debugging and better support for compute shaders in the future.

We also move all of the UI and “business logic” code from Lua to C. This means that Retro Sketch is entirely written in C/Assembly now. We are not removing Lua completely, though. We have plans for allowing developers to write mods in Lua.

Updated UX/UI

So, this was not a direct port from Lua to C, and that means that some of the u I changed a little bit. Also, since the base UI system was rewritten, it means that some of the UI layouts also had to be rewritten.

The biggest change here is that a lot of the tools that were in the toolbox have moved to the menu bar at the top of the screen. That’s right, we now have a traditional menu bar at the top. The original version of Retro Sketch did not have this menu bar because we were primarily focused on getting the Android version done. That means a lot of the desktop UI was based on what would work well on Android.

retro sketch menu bar

This time around, the desktop UI was designed around the idea that it was a desktop application. When we bring back the android version of Retro Sketch, we will have special code to select mobile only UI. Some other things we added were the ability to right-click on layers and animation frames to show the options. Before you would have to double, click on a layer or animation frame to show the options. That has been removed from the desktop version.

Updated Price

Since Retro Sketch was developed as an application to aid in our development of games by allowing us to quickly create pixel art and animation for it, we will be updating the price. We will have a new, much lower price that reflects this dual purpose.

Updates

Most of the work was moving over all the existing systems, but we did add in a few fixes as well as quality of life improvements.

- Complete rewrite to in-house Vulkan C game engine
- Added menu bar at the top for desktop
- Moved most tools out of the toobox to the menu bar
- Greatly reduced memory usage by removing redundant canvas rendering code
- Fixed bug with Atlas export for binary files when scaling the animation
- Fixed bug in selection code that sometimes caused a crash
- Removed lasso selection tool and added selection painting
- Right click on layers, animation frames, and timeline tracks to view options
- Added number row 1-5 to quick swap between colors in first row of color palette
- Made all canvases share the same zoom and position (it was annoying to have different placements per-canvas)

Known issues

There are some known issues that will be fixed in upcoming patches:

- File drag-drop not working
- Some overlay messages are showing at the top of the screen
- Export window doesn’t use aspect ratio of the project
- Sometimes importing PNG files doesn’t refresh the UI previews
- Tools window can’t be collapsed
- Timeline X scroll is uncapped
- Layer window doesn’t fully collapse when clicking title

Future things

Here is a list of some things we’d like to get to at some point in the future

- Auto-scroll timeline to current canvas when opened
- Add flood fill selection hotkey to select tool
- Add FPS to settings so you don’t have to set it in different places
- Save export settings to the project settings be re-used on project reloads
- Show indicator somewhere that there are pending changes (*)
- Add “Open…” option in menu bar (use “New…” to load projects for now)
- Add ability to generate pixels/canvases in LUA (Lua plugin support)

Thanks!

Thanks for supporting Retro Sketch and for any feedback and suggestions you may have. We are game developers and use this tool to create art for our games as well. So any ideas that we haven’t yet thought of would be awesome!

Happy drawing!