Bliz Studio - Trixel Rocket Devlog 02

Creating new ships test and a photoshop trick Trixel Rocket - Coming Summer 2018 (look forward to my first full game - updates every day on social) Website: http://bliz.studio Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blizstudio/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/blizstudiogames/ Twitter: https://twitt

Devlog 02 for Trixel Rocket is a working session on ship art: designing a modular system where a small kit of triangle pieces can be recombined into many different ships — the fleet that will eventually be purchasable with in-game currency. It's framed as a "grand experiment," and by the end the pipeline works. Here's the methodology, since it's genuinely reusable.

The modular piece kit

The art comes from Hexels by Marmoset: a ship base plus a set of colored triangles, each drawn on its own named layer in the layers palette. The idea is that one base and a pile of triangles becomes the construction kit for every future ship. Because the ships render tiny on screen, the pieces are deliberately kept small — detail you can't see is detail you don't draw. The file exports from Hexels as a PSD rather than a flat PNG, keeping the layers separate.

The Photoshop trick: Generate Image Assets

In Photoshop, after deleting an unneeded glow layer and rotating the canvas 90 degrees clockwise so the triangles point up, the naming convention pays off. Each layer is named like ship-red.png — and Photoshop's File → Generate → Image Assets feature watches for exactly that: any layer named with a file extension gets automatically exported as its own file, into a folder Photoshop creates beside the document. Change a layer's color or draw on it, and the PNG regenerates on its own. No more manually saving out each little piece — this one feature is the whole export pipeline.

Assembly in Buildbox as objects

Over in Buildbox, the piece PNGs are imported as objects rather than plain images — the key distinction being that objects can be dragged in and reused over and over without bloating the file size. Once imported, the staging copies get deleted from the scene, leaving a clean object library. Building a new ship is then drag-and-drop: start from the recolored base rocket, pull triangle pieces from the object library, and arrange until the silhouette works. The first test ship comes together imperfectly but convincingly — and at gameplay scale, the rough edges disappear.

Takeaways

Three things worth stealing from this session. First, modular art kits multiply output: a base plus a dozen pieces yields a whole shop's worth of ships. Second, name your layers as filenames and let Generate Image Assets do the exporting — it turns a tedious save-out chore into something automatic. Third, match art detail to on-screen size; tiny sprites forgive a lot. The experiment ends with the new ship wired into the game at a cost of zero (shop interface still pending) and a commitment to build one new ship every day.