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JamChip
Try it early
Try it early

The tabs

One dock, one pin rail, an editor on each pin. Pixel, Tiles and Font draw, Palette holds the colours, and SFX and Tracker make the sounds. A new install shows all six: Pixel, Palette, SFX, Tracker, Font and Tiles. Hide the ones you don’t use from the Project pin, the jar at the top of the rail: ≡ → Preferences → Editors.

The Project pin

Section titled “The Project pin”
The Project pin's page: the JamChip style in use with its colours with Edit palette above them, its Name, Sprites, Grid, Channels and Waves fields, Add palette and Load palette, and the first preset cards under Start from a presetThe Project pin's page: the JamChip style in use with its colours with Edit palette above them, its Name, Sprites, Grid, Channels and Waves fields, Add palette and Load palette, and the first preset cards under Start from a preset

The jar at the top of the rail: your project’s style, which every tab starts new work in, and the documents you opened last. The Project pin says what a style is and how to pick one.

Pixel

Section titled “Pixel”
The Pixel tab: the platformer's player drawn at 16 by 16 on the canvas, the tools down the left, the palette and tags on the right, its frames along the bottomThe Pixel tab: the platformer's player drawn at 16 by 16 on the canvas, the tools down the left, the palette and tags on the right, its frames along the bottom

A sprite editor. Layers with opacity and visibility, frames with their own durations, onion skin, a palette that lives in the document, animation tags that name a range of frames, and an undo history of its own. Pencil, eraser, fill, picker, selection, line, rectangle and ellipse, each on a key.

A document is a .jcsprite. Export it as a PNG, as a sheet with a SpriteFrames beside it, one animation per tag, or as an Aseprite file that Aseprite opens with the layers, tags and durations intact. Or put a PixelSprite2D in a scene, hand it the document, and it draws and animates it as you edit.

SFX

Section titled “SFX”
The SFX tab: the action picker and the rack of sliders for the jump soundThe SFX tab: the action picker and the rack of sliders for the jump sound

A sound generator. Pick the action, Tick, Confirm, Deny, Pickup, Jump, Hit, Boom, Swell, Warn or Drop, roll a new one, then bend it on a rack of sliders until it’s the sound you meant. The action sets the shape and every roll picks a new character, so ten Jumps are ten different sounds that all jump. Random rolls everything. A document is a .sfx.tres; the export is a .wav. Or add a ChiptuneSfxPlayer to the scene, point it at the document, and it renders the sound itself and follows every edit.

Tiles

Section titled “Tiles”
The Tiles tab with its sheet beside its scratch map: grass, dirt and water painted as a strip of ground with two ledges above it, the tileset's tiles along the bottom, water in hand with its name, collision and data on the rightThe Tiles tab with its sheet beside its scratch map: grass, dirt and water painted as a strip of ground with two ledges above it, the tileset's tiles along the bottom, water in hand with its name, collision and data on the right

A tileset editor. Draw the tiles on one sheet with the Pixel tab’s tools, and every cell you draw in turns up as a tile along the bottom. Give a tile a name, collision, data of your own and a terrain, then paint them onto the small map beside the sheet to see how they sit together. Fix a seam on the sheet and the map follows.

A tileset is a .tiles.tres. Hand it to a PixelTileMapLayer and paint the level with Godot’s own tile editor; change a tile and the level changes with it. For a TileMapLayer you already have, PixelTileSet is the same document as a TileSet.

Keys

Section titled “Keys”

F1 in any tab lists its keys. The same list is on the reference page, read from the same table.

JamChip, by GlitterSnack. MIT licence. Built from the source on every merge. Its artwork and screenshots are made with JamChip.