d13design

Welcome to Pixelville

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!

“As the mayor of the newly founded Pixelville I’d like to extend a warm welcome to you. You’re 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?”

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 at all! Just pick your plot, email me to reserve it and get creating. When you’re done just send me your building.

Silver plots are a little more prestigious. To buy one of these you’ll need to create a pretty special building and also add us to your own site - why not write a blog about your creation, add us to your friends list or just add us a plain old banner.

Gold plots are for the industrialists among you - 2 or even 3 storey buildings that are located perfectly for creating industrial or business units. Just like sliver plots, you’ll need to link to us somehow but let me know if you’d like to get your hands on one of these great plots of Pixelville real estate.

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 this image (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.