d13design

“As the mayor of the newly founded Pixelville I’d like to extend a warm welcome to you. Your just the sort of person we’d like to see moving to our town. Why not have a look around and find somewhere you’d like to set up home or shop.”

The idea’s simple, choose a plot of land and check to see if you can afford it (they’re all free but have virtual costs attached). When you have somewhere in mind, drop me an email to request your spot. Once your plot of land is reserved you can get started with building your house.

Welcome to Pixelville

Pixelville is newly founded and quite small but the good news is there’s plenty of plots of land for sale!

NEWS! Pixelville is expanding! Pre-register here…

If you like the look of a plot of land let’s see if you can afford it:

Black plots are the cheapest areas of Pixelville and will cost you nothing more than adding our link to your website–add us to your blogrole or just on a list of friends.

Silver plots are a little more prestigious. To buy one of these you’ll need to create a pretty special building and also commit to writing about Pixelville on your blog or website.

Gold plots are for the industrialists among you - 2 or even 3 storey buildings that are located perfectly for creating industrial or business units. Drop me an email to find out more about getting one of these.

Red plots are extremely special and you’ve got to have connections to get one of these. If you’re a personal friend of the mayor, why not give it a try - you never know your luck!

Building your home - a quickstart guide

All of the buildings in Pixelville are based on the same graphical template. Some buildings are bigger than others but are essentially built using cubes or building blocks.

The easiest way to get started is to download the image above (right-click and choose Save As) and use this as a base.

Using your favourite graphics package, set the template as the bottom layer and lock it. Then create a new layer on top to hold your new image.

Start by creating a basic outline of your building using the bitmap pencil tool. When you’re happy you can start to add some flat shading.

In Pixelville the sun is always shining. This means that the top face of your building will be the lightest. Then, because of the direction of the sun the right-hand face will by lighter than the left.

When you’re happy you can start to add some more details - making sure to follow the correct angles. Finally you can add some detailed shading and highlights to your colours.

Make sure that all of your lines are not using anti-aliasing, they should all be crisp lines with no blurring. When exporting your finished image make sure to save it as a GIF image with a transparent background using alpha transparency.

If you want to get really adventurous you could create your building as an animated GIF image - who knows what could happen when you add animation!

New districts coming soon…

Now that the town of Pixelville has its own functioning space agency, the sky’s the limit for the good inhabitants. Not only can Pixelvillians travel to new places, they can even colonise the moon!

So, with their new found love of travel the towns-folk are establishing 2 new maps, a sister town and a moon base. Unlike Pixelville, the planning regulations will be a little more free so if you want to move in then your building can be almost any shape or design. Bear in mind that buildings on the moon need to be adequately “sci-fi”!

Here’s a set of templates you could use for your building on either of these new maps:

If you’d like to pre-register your plot of land then send me an email with your building attached as a GIF and let me know whether it’s for the moon base or the new town.

Disclaimer

All artwork featured as part of the Pixelville project is copyright its respective owners. Please do not distribute or reuse images from this project without the expressed permission of its creators.

By submitting artwork to the Pixelville project you agree that d13design (Dave Waller) is free to use your submitted artwork both as part of the d13design website (www.d13design.co.uk) and as part of materials promoting the Pixelville project.

Credits

I have to admit that this concept was by no means my own idea, there’s plenty of sites out there doing a similar thing and I thought I’d list the ones that inspired me so you can check them out.

Icontown.net is a great little community driven site that holds a whole host of wacky buildings submitted from artists all over the world. It’s well worth a look for inspiration before you start your Pixelville creation. I’d also like to thank Icontown for the useful little tutorial on creating isometric pixel images which I’ve cannibalised for this site. Unfortunately, the site isn’t updated any more but it still looks great.

As always, IconBuffet is a constant source of inspiration for creating icons and little images. The great community concept makes it even more fun to get involved with.