Home › What's new

What's new in KistePix

What changed in each version — including the things that went wrong and got fixed. Every update is included in the purchase: enter your purchase e-mail on "Download again" and you get the current build.

Version 1.2.0 — 21 July 2026

A tester asked how to get his sprite sheet into GameMaker. Three things came out of that question: an export made for GameMaker, a user guide inside the program, and a guard that stops you throwing away unsaved work by accident.

New

• Sprite sheet for GameMaker. The export now offers a fourth format: Sprite-Sheet (GameMaker). The sheet itself is the same as before — all frames in one row, equally sized cells, no spacing. What is new is the file name: it carries the frame count, so “ball” becomes ball_strip5.png. That is exactly how GameMaker recognises a sprite sheet: you drag the file into the IDE, it is sliced into five frames automatically, and the suffix disappears from the sprite name again. KistePix works out the number itself; you only type the name. With this, Godot, Unity, Phaser and GameMaker all read KistePix sheets directly — the first three through the JSON file that ships alongside, GameMaker through the file name. Thanks to SaymonixG, who ran into this and kept asking. (One thing remains, and it should be said plainly: GameMaker knows only one speed for the whole sprite, not a duration per frame — different frame durations become a sprite speed there.)
• A user guide inside the program. Under Help there is now a proper guide: eight chapters along real tasks rather than a keyword list — first steps, painting and colours, layers, animation, selecting and moving, exporting to game engines, saving and file formats, and a chapter for when something does not work. It lives in the program, so it needs no internet, and it switches between German and English along with the interface. The short key-and-tool reference stays alongside it.
• A guard against losing work. Closing KistePix with unsaved work now asks whether you really want to quit — through the window's close button just as through File › Quit. With nothing open, it does not ask. “Open” means anything that would go into the project file: pixels, undo steps, frames and their durations, layers with their opacity and visibility, canvas size and the palette. Zoom, grid or tool choice do not count — they are not in the file and should not hold you up for nothing.

Files

Version 1.1.0 — 19 July 2026

A new tool for working together with the Pixel Gallery — and a fill bug that a sharp eye turned up while painting.

New

• "Send to Gallery". Via File › Send to Gallery your finished piece goes straight into the Pixel Gallery — the companion library that collects, sorts and further-exports your pixel art (ZIP, sprite sheet, animated GIF, colour palettes). You give the image a title, and the two programs handle the rest between them: next time you open the gallery, your piece is in its collection. The Pixel Gallery belongs to KistePix — here's what it does.

Fixed

• The fill tool ran across the opacity boundary. If you laid down a semi-transparent area — say a soft sky at low opacity — and used the same colour fully opaque right next to it, the paint bucket bled across the border: it treated both areas as one and flooded the whole connected field. The reason: it compared only the colour, not the opacity. Now it sees the whole cell — colour and opacity — and stays within what actually looks the same. (Thanks for looking closely!) To replace a colour regardless of opacity, you still use the dedicated "Replace colour" tool.

Files

Version 1.0.1 — 14 July 2026

A maintenance update: one small improvement from a tester's feedback, plus three bugs that all had one thing in common — the program computed the right thing but displayed the wrong thing.

New

• Esc leaves fullscreen. Exactly the key your hand reaches for. Esc deliberately does not switch fullscreen on — only off, so it can never surprise you. (Thanks for the suggestion!)

Fixed

• Frame thumbnails stayed blank after loading a project. Open a saved project with several frames and the timeline only showed the active frame — every other tile was white until you clicked it. The artwork was always there; it just was not being drawn. All thumbnails now appear straight after loading.
• The export dialog showed the wrong image sizes. The scale menu always claimed "Original (16×16)", "×8 (128×128)", "×16 (256×256)" — no matter how big the canvas actually was. On a 48×36 canvas not one of those numbers was right. The entries are now simply "Original", "×8" and "×16", and the real output size in pixels appears below them — for a sprite sheet including every frame laid out in a row.
• The tabs in the palette window did not follow the language switch. Switch between German and English while working and the three tabs stayed in whatever language the program had started in — English tabs above German buttons. The whole window now switches.

Files

Version 1.0 — 11 July 2026

The first public release. What has been in it from the start:

• Layers with opacity, show and hide.
• Animation on a timeline — every frame with its own duration in milliseconds.
• Palettes of up to 256 colours, with templates and a palette format of its own.
• Twelve tools: pencil, eraser, fill, replace, line, rectangle, circle, select, lasso, mirror axis, eyedropper, hand.
• Brush sizes 1–4 pixels and a symmetry mode.
• A transparency checkerboard, so you can tell "empty" from "white".
• PNG import, and export to PNG, animated GIF and sprite sheet with Aseprite-compatible JSON.
• Canvases up to 2048 × 2048, with smooth zoom and pan.
• English and German interface, switchable with one click.

What is being worked on

No promises and no dates — but so you know where this is going:

• Reordering frames by dragging them in the timeline (currently done with the arrow buttons).
• PNG export with real transparency instead of a white background.
• A Linux build.

Found a bug? Write to fehler@kistepix.com — that is exactly how the three fixes above came about.