Inspiration
Once I heard that the theme was about arts the first idea that came to mind was pixel art. This is because I use pixel art often when I am making games. Many of these games have won competitions and this makes pixel art have a special place in my heart. I wanted to share my passion for pixel art with the younger generation so I decided to make a website that simplified making pixel art for kids.
What it does
We made a simple pixel art creator website. The website was made to be simple and straightforward to make it approachable and enjoyable for kids. To do this we didn't want to have any complex tool we wanted to keep only what was necessary. On the website, there are 3 tools: a pencil tool, an eraser tool, and a color selector tool.
How we built it
This website is fully front end, with almost no backend. The front end is made up of vanilla javascript, HTML, and CSS. We didn't use any extra CSS frameworks, API, or databases except express on the backend to send the webpage files to the client. This was because we wanted to challenge ourselves to find solutions on our own.
Challenges
The biggest challenge in the development of the website was the math that was involved. This is because we wanted to have a canvas that the user would be able to zoom into and move around. This means that we had to make a custom 2drenderer and camera system. This takes a lot of math and if you make a small mistake anywhere it'll break the code. To make matters worse debugging the camera and renderer can take a hefty amount of time. Although we overcame the obstacle and made the camera and rendering system.
What's next for Real Pixel Art
We wanted to make real pixel art into websites that kids can go to whenever they want to make art. Although before we release it we want to improve the website by adding some more tools. These tools are the paintbrush tool and the paint bucket tool. We also want to add an export feature and database to save projects onto the website. Once that is done we plan to put it onto the public domain where kids from all around the world can come to make pixel art.
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