Tessarium

Designed around real-world game development. Tessarium focuses on fast pixel art level building while keeping tiles and colours optimised for your platform.

Key concepts

• Edit a linked tile once and every instance updates across your level.
• Build reusable tilesets that can be shared between projects.
• Work quickly on the canvas and use built-in tools to optimise tile usage.
• Use platform guidance to highlight inefficient tile usage or colour limits.

Features

• Tile-first workflow with linked tile editing (change once, update everywhere)
• Shared tilesets and palettes – create, link, pull and update across levels built with shared tiles
• Draw directly on canvas, then convert to tile(s) with CMD/CTRL + Click
• Single or Multi-tile stamping, right click on a tile or drag to stamp duplicates of your selection on the canvas
• Tile optimisation tools: Reidentify, Merge Duplicates, Remove Unused, and one-click Optimise
• Tile usage heat-map to spot costly unique tiles and manage limits with tile counts
• Colour guidance: Highlight any tiles that are exceeding the platforms colours per tile.
• Load a platform, GB, GBC, NES, SNES, SMS, SMD, C64 to load preset guidance for tile and colour limits, or create your own custom guidance.
• Platform specific colour swatches
• GB Studio font support – load custom fonts and place directly into levels
• GB Studio dimensions check – check a new canvas against level limits, both in dimensions and stopping non whole tile dimensions (causes GB Studio compile issues)
• GB Studio UI border boxes* – import your projects dialogue frames and use it to draw borders and boxes of any dimensions.
• Terrain tools* – Terrain Box, Terrain Line, Terrain Fill; set corner pieces, chain together tiles that need to sit next to each other, choose to have Tessarium shuffle your Terrain pieces for unique terrains.
• Quick tile fill tools – solid, border, solid and gradient dither fills
• Precise tile edit mode – right click on a tile in your tile set to focus in and edit with the brush tool directly from the tileset (pinch/wheel to zoom in). Changes updated in real time in the canvas.
• Outline and recolour* artwork automatically
• Import Aseprite, PyxelEdit & Tiled files
• Marquee selection with pixel-precise and tile-snapped modes (CMD/CTRL tile snaps)
• Rulers, guides, and other essential editor tools
• Layer support (visibility, opacity, blend modes, merge actions)
• Themes and re-orderable UI*

*Pro features.

macOS note

For the macOS app, you may need to run:

xattr -cr /Applications/Tessarium.app

On older macOS versions, right-clicking and choosing Open may also be needed the first time.