Godot 2D Pixel Art Starter Project

🤨 What is this?

Just like the project name says, this is a starter project for working in 2D with pixel art in the Godot Engine.

🤔 Why?

I was tired of always needing to set various project settings when creating a new, pixel art based, 2D project in the Godot engine. So I've set up this project with the common settings I need for working on 2D pixel art games. I thought maybe someone else might find it useful to have as a starting point if they work mostly in pixel art like us!

🎁 So what's in it?

Not a ton since it is a bare-bones starter project. It's meant to allow you to fire it up and get to work without mucking about with a bunch of project settings.

Here's is what I added:

• Git Ignore file: This is a dead simple ignore file that just adds common directories/files for Godot projects. It was created by gitignore.io.
• A pixel art icon: instead of the regular one, you'll see a 32x32 pixel art icon based on the Godot mascot. This will allow you to see that the pixels are sharp for your assets.
• Default import settings: I setup the texture import settings to default to 2D Pixel. I think this should carry over if you download this repo since it is a project setting. If this doesn't work (i.e. you start importing your own pixel art and it looks blurry), you can change this in the Import tab of the editor (next to the Scene tab by default). Simply click on Preset -> 2D Pixel and then the Reimport button. Then click on Preset -> Set as Default for 'Texture'.
• Basic World scene: this scene just displays the pixel art icon in the center of the screen. It is also located in the Scenes folder to hopefully encourage project organization. 😉
• Project settings: I changed quite a few project settings. Here they are:
  • Application -> Run -> Main Scene: set to the world scene created
  • Display -> Window
    • Width: 320
    • Height: 180
    • Test Width: 1280
    • Test Height: 720
  • Display -> Stretch
    • Mode: viewport
    • Aspect: keep
  • Rendering -> Quality -> 2d
    • Use Pixel Snap: true
  • Input Map: I set up some input mappings as well.
    • For the directional inputs (ui_up, ui_down, ui_left, & ui_right), I added the Left Joystick Axis so your gamepad's left stick works for directional input (not sure why this isn't set by default since the D-Pad is setup by default 🤷‍♀️).
    • I also mapped Z to ui_accept, C to ui_select, and X to ui_cancel. These are just personal preference mappings. Feel free to change these to suit your needs for your project!

Resolution: I set up the target resolution to be 320x180 because that is usually the resolution I aim for when working on pixel art based projects. I probably wouldn't push it much higher than this. Also, you can probably set the Test width and height to 1920x1080 if you're working on a 4K display.

👩‍💻 Contributing

If you have any settings that you like to have setup by default when working on pixel art games, let me know! I may be convinced to add it to this base project! 😉

🍻 Cheers & Happy Coding! 💖

🎯 Changelog

• 13 May 2020: Updated the display stretch mode to viewport and turned on pixel snap per suggestion from Twitter discussion.