mipix

A package to assist the development of Ebitengine pixel art games.

This package allows you to implement your game working with logical canvases and ignoring Game.Layout() completely. Scaling is managed internally with pixel art aware scaling algorithms, and support for camera movement, zoom and screen shakes are also available through the API.

Features

• Draw pixel art logically without having to deal with device scale factors, DPI, scaling and projections yourself.
• Basic camera with smooth tracking, zoom and screen shakes. Most behaviors can be customized through interfaces.
• Interleave high resolution and logical draws when necessary.

Context

This package implements the second model described on lopix. If lopix implements the simplest model for pixel art games, mipix is slightly more advanced and provides a much more practical foundation to build pixel art games:

• You are expected to place most of your game world elements at integer coordinates.
• Your draw method receives a logically sized offscreen corresponding to a specific area of your game world. This area can vary based on the current camera position, zoom and shake, but you are simply given the task of rendering a logical area of your game world, directly and in pure pixels, to a logically sized canvas.
• For UI and other camera-independent parts of your game, you can create mipix.Offscreens manually, again with pure pixel based sizes, render on them in a straight-forward manner and then use the built-in Offscreen.Project() method to deal with the scaling and stretching and filtering and all that nonsense.

While side scrollers can be implemented with this model, that's probably not ideal. In most side-scrollers, developers use floating point positions for characters, which are smoothly "sliding through the floor" as animations change¹. Doing this requires drawing the characters on a high resolution canvas. The API offers basic support for this, but it's not the main focus of the package. If you have many fractionally positioned characters and elements, the mipix model might not be the best match.

Code example

I haven't written examples oriented to end users yet, the only examples available are a bit overkill as they were designed to help me debug and test features. See https://github.com/tinne26/mipix-examples.

Footnotes

1. As opposed to this "sliding animation" model, pixel artists can design their animations to look good as they advance through the concrete pixel grid, with concrete pixel advances between frames. This isn't supported by most animation libraries, takes more work for the artist, takes more work for the developer, and makes animation usage more rigid (e.g., need separate "walking on stairs" animation)... but with this model, you can draw moving characters in the logical canvas. This is more common on RPGs and top down games than side scrollers, but it's fairly uncommon everywhere in general. Smoothness perception throughout movement is also of a different class. ↩