Pixelbuddies 2D is a tool I made aimed at indie and hobbyist game developers with no/small budgets. Using my tool, they can create a character and export it as 64x64 with four viewpoints.

Role: In this project, I created everything by myself.

Goal: By creating this project, I wanted to satisfy two goals of mine, these being: 1. Researching how a character creator works in a game and 2, creating a tool that is useful for indies.

Research: Before starting development, I had two questions that I needed to answer: what engine will I use? And what game am I using as a reference?

After looking at multiple engines, I quickly concluded that Godot was the right engine for this project. Godot is very lightweight and would make the tool quickly load in browsers. Furthermore, I already had a little experience with this engine.

For the reference game, I picked Stardew Valley as the game is made by a single developer, which inspires me and makes me relate to my target audience. The UI layout and options for the character are heavily based on Stardew Valley.

Result: The tool was released on Itch.io as an HTML game. By embedding it into a webpage (like this page), users can easily and quickly create their character and export it.

I released this tool for free under a Creative Commons Attribution License. This license means anyone can use the spritesheets created with this for any purpose as long as I am credited.