Pixel Art Academy: Learn Mode

About this game

Latest news

• Patch Notes·15 Aug 2026Official

  Artwork preview fix

  If you created any of your own artworks, looking at their fullscreen preview (clicking on the canvas while on the clipboard) made the game freeze. This small patch makes it work again. Sorry about that!
  Read full article on Community Announcements (Retro)

• Patch Notes·20 Jul 2026Official

  Patch for too many chess pieces

  Some of you were able to buy 9 pawns in Chess Academy. This patch will fix your save file and prevent any others from being too speedy in the chess shop. No more breaking the chess law!
  Read full article on Community Announcements (Retro)

• Announcements·13 Jul 2026Official

  Chess art project

  TL;DR:An art project in which you draw small, 2D chess pieces.Playtest your art on the Pixeltosh and learn the rules of chess.A chess magazine with 90 references to get inspired by.4 chessboard themes and a dark interface mode to match your art style.Play against the computer, a friend, or watch Pixeltosh play itself in 5 difficulty levels.Following Pixel Art Academy's typical progression (tutorial → challenge → project), we're rounding up the exploration of simplification and pixel art size with a project where you draw sprites for a chess video game.After you've drawn the icons in the readability challenge, you get access to Chess Academy, a Pixeltosh program where you design pieces for the game's 2D view. (3D style will be available in the future after I add the form element of art.)In Chess Academy, you slowly unlock pieces as you buy them in the game shop.For each piece, you get to draw the white and black variants.And you have 64 Squares, a chess magazine full of references to help you along the way.With each newly drawn piece, you jump through quick lessons that teach you all the rules of chess.When you complete your set of 16 pieces, you're ready to face Pixeltosh in a full game, play against a friend, or pit the computer against itself.As you can see from the screenshots, you can customize the chessboard theme and turn on dark mode, whichever fits best with the art style of your pieces.I hope this gives you enough creative freedom to design a chess game to your liking. The project is set up non-linearly so you can complete the pieces in any order you want.Chess Academy took a bit longer to develop since it's a bigger 'end game' project like Pinball. You can check out the process behind making it in the devlog:This concludes the main content for the 'shape' element of art. I'll now take some time to polish this part of the game before we move onto color in the second half of 2026. If you have any requests for quality-of-life improvements, drop them in the di...
  Read full article on Community Announcements (Retro)

• Announcements·15 May 2026Official

  Steam Cloud and more

  TL;DR:Steam Cloud available for existing and new saves.Universal macOS build with native Apple Silicon support.SteamOS/Linux build enabled, see below.Storage and performance optimizations.I finally completed the basic Steam integration into the game, the first bonus of which is support for Steam Cloud. After you load your save game, you can enable Steam Cloud in the popup dialog.If you don't enable it, you can do it later through the load menu (click edit and select your save game).You can also disable Steam Cloud here later, if you want your save game to be available just locally on that computer. The option to use Steam Cloud now appears when you're starting a new game as well.And to easily see which save game you're currently on, you can see the floppy disk in the bottom-right corner of the pause menu.The save files on your hard drive now get compressed on load (including backups, which are also pruned to the last 10 days the game was run). The save games themselves are not very big (mine is at 8 MB currently), but the backups could add up if you ran the game often, so this now limits it.~While I was working on integrating Steam into the game, I also improved other aspects of my build process. The game is built with Electron and I've now updated to the latest version, which might lead to a performance boost, but more importantly, allows me to use all the latest browser features in the future.An even bigger improvement should come to players on macOS as the app is now universal, meaning it ships with Apple Silicon binaries (no more Rosetta translation on new macs).I also enabled the Linux build after testing everything on the Steam Deck. The only thing is, to enable the native build, you have to go to Properties and under Compatibility choose to force the "Steam Linux Runtime 1.0" option. The default is Proton, as chosen by Valve during initial testing, and I'll try to get that changed with them (no idea how long that takes though).~No video devlog this time since...
  Read full article on Community Announcements (Retro)

• Patch Notes·21 Apr 2026Official

  Readability analysis hotfix

  There was a bug where the readability analysis didn't give you a checkmark if you used undo to get back to the state of the drawing before you opened the analysis paper. I've changed the logic now a bit so that the analysis always computes in the background and it only shows after you first open the paper (so it doesn't distract you when you're initially drawing).
  Read full article on Community Announcements (Retro)