Bixel Studio is a native macOS 2D game-asset studio designed for pixel artists, game developers, and animators. Built from the ground up for Apple Silicon with a sleek Procreate-style dark interface, Bixel Studio pairs high-performance native Metal rendering with a powerful Rust engine and an integrated AI assistant.
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🎨 Pixel Art & Sprite Editor
- Full cel and layer management with blend modes, opacity, and visibility controls.
- Classic palette presets (DB32, PICO-8, Game Boy) plus custom color disc and hex pickers.
- Fluid, responsive drawing tools (brush, eraser, line, shape, flood fill).
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⏱️ Animation Timeline
- Multi-frame timeline with tags, looping modes, and variable frame durations.
- Real-time playback and customizable onion skinning for smooth frame-by-frame animation.
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🗺️ Tilemap Designer
- Grid-based tilemap editing with layer support, autotiling, and pattern stamping.
- Native compatibility with Tiled map formats for easy game engine export.
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🤖 Integrated AI Assistant
- Natural-language game asset generation and spritesheet creation.
- Image-to-image workflows: predict next animation frames, remove backgrounds, and quantize palettes.
- Powered by flexible AI providers (OpenRouter & ChatGPT Codex).
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⚡ Native Metal Performance
- Hardware-accelerated canvas rendering with infinite canvas navigation, butter-smooth zoom, and zero latency.
Clone the repository and run the automated start script:
git clone https://github.com/ajithberlin/bixel-native.git
cd bixel-native
./scripts/start.shOr run the one-liner directly:
git clone https://github.com/ajithberlin/bixel-native.git && cd bixel-native && ./scripts/start.shThen press Cmd + R in Xcode to run the app.
Tip: To build and launch the app directly from your terminal, run:
./scripts/start.sh --run
Explore the complete Bixel Studio Handbook for detailed guides on the interface, drawing tools, keyboard shortcuts, animation timeline, tilemap designer, and AI assistant skills.