Posted by Alonso Martin

The game has been walking great this past couple of weeks. I’ll make an update in a short while to talk about that.

Meanwhile, I wanted to share something useful to those of you who also sprite and are into pixel-art. It’s an upscaling and transforming tool made by Lithander/Pixelpracht called PixelPunch. I’ve used this tool for a while, and I find it invaluable. It’s saved me a lot of time when making variations of a single sprite. Here’s an example:

(Click to zoom-in)

Say, for instance, you need to make a bigger version of an enemy. Normally you’d scale it up without pixel-blending and get a lot of nasty artifacts. Then you’d have to correct all those, and godspeed if you have several frames of animation to fix. With PixelPunch, you upscale it by 3x using any of the algorithms available and take it to your spriting software. In my case, I scaled it down by 50% to conceal some of the “guesswork” made by the algorithm. Then I changed the palette and quickly went over it to fix the general issues, though a lot more polishing could be done.

Download PixelPunch here

There’s two reasons why I want to share this: firstly, because it’s a huge time saver. But secondly, I’d love it if Lithander got some motivation to work more on this tool. It would be great if it had .gif animation support, proportional transformation, loading/saving support, onion-skinning to compare to other images, maybe a few more algorithms, etc.

If you like this, let him know at @pixelpracht! If we’re lucky, he’ll get on it if enough people like his work. His website is offline, so I took the liberty of mirroring the file on my server.