Week 7 - New Program...

Unit 8

Piskel

Accessed on 5/18/2016: http://www.piskelapp.com/

Piskel is a simple web based tool for creating sprites and pixel art. The program requires no download and is free to use, so long as you have a stable internet connection you can access and use the program. This makes it easy to access from both home and college, so I would be able to work at college, then get home and pick up where I left off. Also it is linked to your google account so you can save any work you do online. This means that you don't need to rely on external storage and the work will always be available.

When you load the program up you will be greeted with a 32x32 pixel canvas. This can be re-sized by using the option on the side. There are options to keep the aspect ratio which will allow you to keep proportions the same and even one that will re-size the content, allowing you to up-size smaller works. You can also change the default size the program will load up in, which would be useful if you were making several sprites of the same size.

Changing the size

The program has several tools that you can use to create sprites with, but the main one is the pen tool. This allows you to colour pixels in one of four different sizes ranging from 1x1 to 4x4 pixels. You can create colour palettes that allow you to remember what colours a you used for sprites. This can be useful for several sprites that use the same colour palette.

A quick look at the few tools available

The program uses a layered system which allows you to make more complex sprites or you could make the different features on different layers, allowing you to delete of change one part without messing up another. There is also an onion skinning option which adds a transparant overlay of all the other layers. This is useful for making moving sprites where you need to know what the frame before looked like, and yes it does allow you to add frames so you can make an entire animated sprite.

A basic animation I made using frames

While I did plan to create all my sprites in Adobe Illustrator, the simplicity and usefulness of this program has convinced me to switch to using this. Not only that but also it will allow me to work at home, something that would not be possible if I used Illustrator as I do not have it on my computer.