Tessarium

Tessarium is a tile-first all in one, pixel art level editor. Designed for retro console development, including (but not limited to) Game Boy DMG/Color development and smoother GB Studio workflows.

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

Coming from Pyxel Edit? See how Tessarium compares — the linked tile workflow carries over, and Tessarium opens your existing .pyxel files.

Building levels in Tiled? Tessarium draws the tile art Tiled cannot, and imports and exports .tmj maps. New to tiles, or coming from Photoshop? Start with tile-based level design.

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.
• Dynamic terrain building tools and prefab support to speed up level creation with your tile sets

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
• Isometric guidelines and diamond shapes
• 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)
• Includes GB Sans 8 bit font family (regular,italics,small caps, mini)
• 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.