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 discussion forums as I will be implementing the ones that can be done relatively quickly. And as always, if you find any bugs, I really appreciate the help by reporting them so this can be the best learning game it can be.
Cheers!
—Retro