Generated art and sound
Why there are no image files, and how to change what things look like.
6 min readNothing in a starter kit is a file. Every sprite is drawn onto a canvas when the game loads, and every sound is synthesised. A project is a few kilobytes of description rather than a folder of assets, which is why a new one opens instantly and an export is tiny.
Changing how something looks
Open Assets, pick a generated texture, and change its parameters. Most take a palette, a size and a seed.
- palette — a named colour set: hero, neon, slime, goblin, canary, drone, cyan, red, violet, amber, orange, teal, grass, stone.
- seed — any number. The same seed always produces the same art, so a project never changes appearance between reloads.
The generators
| Generator | Produces |
|---|---|
| character | A walking character sheet with run, jump and fall frames |
| creature | An enemy |
| spaceship | A ship, top-down |
| vehicleTop | A car, top-down |
| prop | Crates, rocks, obstacles |
| pickup / gemSet | Coins, gems, collectables |
| button | A UI button — shape, style, fill/border colour and a text label |
| tileset | A terrain tileset with slopes |
| raceTrack | A circuit, plus the racing line the AI follows |
| maze | A maze or a set of rooms, plus its grid |
| groundPlane | A seamlessly tiling road or terrain, for Mode-7 |
| gradientSky / starfield / cityscape | Backdrops |
Using your own art
Upload an image under Assets and reference it like any other texture. Uploads are type-checked by content rather than by file extension.
Sound
Sound effects are synthesised from a type and a few parameters — laser, explosion, pickup, jump, noise, engine, hit. Change the type or the duration and it is a different effect, with no file to re-record.