Another Year!
The 17th of August marks 4 years since the launch of Coloring Pixels! Even after all this time, the continued, lasting support and growth of this community still overwhelms us and we cannot thank all of you enough for helping us get this far! <3
It has been another milestone year for us here as ToastieLabs! Since the last anniversary, we have maintained the steady release schedule that we implemented in the previous year and we have managed to add 12 additional DLC books to Coloring Pixels! From Retro to the most recent Bakery book! That's 240 new levels, not to forget the free r/Place book which has caused a lot of you original players to return to our game!
As a result of the growth you have all permitted, we have been able to expand our small team (2 people) to be not quite as small - we now have a full-time artist who can dedicate even more time to Coloring Pixels! We have plans to continue the support for our community and aim to make another year of DLC, along with some requested feature updates from you, our community.
To celebrate this momentous milestone: We have added a new free bonus image to Coloring Pixels, we are hosting the 4th annual pixel art competition, and all* available ToastieLabs games and DLC on Steam will be 20% off all week long!
DLC that is within a month of release is not included in the ToastieLabs sale*
ToastieLabs Games Studio Growth
We are still a fledgling Games Studio as we are approaching 2 years of full-time ToastieLabs this September. We are very proud of what we have managed to achieve in this short time with your help!
4 Huge milestones!
- We have started releasing our games on Nintendo Switch, both hexceed and Coloring Pixels!
- We have changed from a Self-Employed studio to a Limited Company (boring I know, but an important step for us)
- We are moving into a new much bigger office! We hope to be there a while, so it will be nice to have somewhere to call home for the next few years!
- Lastly and more importantly, we have hired a 3rd member of our team! Jack, a Junior Digital Artist!
Coloring Pixels Changes
Most of the Coloring Pixels DLC work was handed over once more, this time Lee is passing the responsibilities of Coloring Pixels over to Jack, our new Full-time Digital Artist.
For you Coloring Pixels lovers, this means that the artwork in-game can be more consistent and more importantly, better altered with your feedback. I strongly recommend you join our Discord server where Jack regularly interacts with our members to seek feedback, improvement and ideas!
For us as a games studio, it frees up Rob and Lee to focus on supporting all our games regularly as well as developing brand new, more ambitious titles!
The new DLC process has been refined!
As we are sticking to a monthly release schedule for new Coloring Pixels books, we are very quickly going through the list of ideas we originally had.
In order to address this, we have included the community in our 3 step decision-making process!
Make a Suggestion - You can send us your suggestions for book themes in any format! Be that email, Steam Community, Discord or Twitter! If we like it, we pop it in our Discord Server
Discord Voting - All the ideas get put in a big long list on our Discord server, anyone in our Discord can add reactions to the ideas they want to see next in Coloring Pixels!
Patreon get's the final say - The top 5 reacted suggestions in the big list, get sent to our Patreons in a monthly poll, to thank our Patreons for going the extra mile to support us, they all get to vote on which of the 5 ideas they want to see next month!
So if you have any suggestions, let us know, get voting in Discord and your idea could be the next one we make for Coloring Pixels!
Nintendo Switch!
After our learning process last year with hexceed - we were very excited to jump right in with a Nintendo Switch build of Coloring Pixels: Collection 1
We were cautious of the change in sale format from Steam to Switch but you have received the game so well that we have already made a start on Collection 2! So thank you for enjoying our game and we look forward to providing you with more Nintendo Switch content!
hexceed
Another small mention on hexceed. We are still very excited by the love and attention you have given to hexceed! Year 2 of hexceed has been a blast and we will be reviewing our options for another year in the coming months!
It is amazing how much you all still enjoy the new content, so truly, from us here at ToastieLabs - Thank you! ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1463920
Who Shuffled My Shapes?
A step into the unknown! We created a brand new game, Who Shuffled My Shapes?
A Rubik's cube-inspired puzzle game with 20 different shapes for you to enjoy.
The purpose of this title was for us to trial a number of things, an experiment if you may.
- Firstly we wanted to dip our toes into the world of 3D Games, although this game is very light, it was still a good practice ground to get familiar with the ins and outs of a 3D environment.
- Secondly, we wanted to see how well a different pricing model will be received by our community, a game with a set price instead of a Free-to-Play with DLC - we believe for a game of this scale, we should look at alternative options that what we provided.
- Finally, and most excitingly, we tried out the Steam Next Fest! This is a regular festival held by Valve for new titles to all be put into the spotlight with a week of free demos, developer live streams and community interaction - this was incredibly fun for us to do and something we will certainly be looking at again for future releases!
If you haven't already, check out the store page here and give it a try!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1868060
Community
As always, every Coloring Pixels Birthday is dedicated to you, our community.
Since last year, our community has continued to grow and develop and we are very excited about what we have achieved together.
Social Media - Twitter was already a good place to go for interaction between us and the community but it has been exciting to see the continued growth of our Twitter, thank you!
Discord - Our Community Discord server has continued to grow beyond what we expected. We now have over 1100 of you in our Discord and chat with us and each other every single day! It really makes the work we put in worth it to get instant interaction with you, from your suggestions and feedback to jokes and special server roles! A huge thank you to our moderators, helpers, and community as a whole for keeping this a safe space for everyone to hang out.
Reddit - We have a ToastieLabs subreddit! Still small and cosy but we post regularly with updates for those of you who prefer this format.
YouTube - We have kept the Dev Blog going all year due to your support and love of the weekly videos! Drop by to see the inside of the development process from week to week. Almost reaching 2000 subscribers on YouTube (1995 to be exact as of writing this) is way more than we ever imagined.
Patreon - A huge thank you to everyone on our Patreon, we set this up after months of requests from you offering to support us in more ways than just buying our games. We did not expect much from it but we are absolutely blown away by the support you give and cannot thank you all enough - approaching 2 whole years of support from some of you means so much to us, we cannot thank you enough <3
A special mention to our Patreons for their contribution to Coloring Pixels by voting on what DLC they want to see each month!
Merch - We have kept this going since last year and have since expanded our range! New hats, new mugs and new posters! Thank you to everyone who has purchased merch and is representing our Games out in the real world!
More to Come!
We are just getting started! Coloring Pixels will see another year of DLC, hexceed is finishing up Year 2 in December and we will be looking for your input on what to do next, more games will be coming to the Nintendo Switch - and most excitingly, we have a number of brand new, unannounced games in the works which will be coming throughout 2023!
So keep your eyes on our Socials and your Toast at the ready to keep up-to-date with what is coming next!
The Annual Pixel Art Competition
Continuing the tradition! The 5th annual Coloring Pixels art competition is here! For anyone who isn't aware, this competition is the chance for you to get your own pixel art into Coloring Pixels! The winners of our previous competitions have their art in the Community books which you can play right now!
For more information on the competition and how to submit your art, follow this link:
https://steamcommunity.com/games/897330/announcements/detail/3362519627202806205
Anniversary Sale!
All ToastieLabs games and DLC are on sale this week to celebrate the anniversary!
Don't miss out: https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/21241/ToastieLabs_Collection/
New Birthday Level!
To celebrate another year of ToastieLabs, we have added a brand new FREE Bonus book image to Coloring Pixels! This is the most Coloring Pixels Cake yet - hand drawn by our very own Artist, Jack!
4 tiers, 1 for each year of Coloring Pixels. Using the color palette of the game logo and representing different book themes on each layer!
Come and celebrate with us!
Coloring Pixels V1.18.0 Patch Notes
New Features
- Added a free new image "Birthday Cake 4" to the Bonus book.
- Re-Re-Re-added the “Your Art” button to the main menu so you can enter the competition!
- Added some brief details about this year's pixel art competition.
- Added links to more details and how to submit to the pixel art competition.
- Made the Exit button smaller to make room for the Your Art button.
- Added a "Total Pixels Colored Counter" on the settings page. The number increases by 1 for every pixel you correctly color! Unfortunately, this is not a statistic we have been tracking since before this update so all players will start at 0.
- Add a new "Highlight Palette Text" accessibility setting (Default to off) - When enabled, the numbers on the palette get an extra highlight around them, to make it easier to read the numbers in dark colors.
- Added an additional UI element on the main menu to highlight which book is currently open.
- Added Linux Support, a highly requested feature!
Bug Fixes and Misc
- Fixed a bug where the number 1 could incorrectly appear on the pallet when you have "Remove Completed Colors" on and "Lock Completed Pixels" turned off.
- Updated Credits page to add our newest team member Jack.