Skip to main content

Dixel 0.0.23: tilemaps and tileset export

· 2 min read
The Dixel Team
Dixel — Pixel art, built for Android

Dixel 0.0.23 brings tilemaps. Build a level or a scene from reusable tiles, edit a tile once and watch every copy update, then export a sheet and a map your game engine can read. Tilemap editing is Pro; everything else in the app is unchanged.

Draw once, reuse everywhere​

Add a tilemap layer from the Tileset panel — the bottom Tileset tab on a phone, or a floating panel on the inner foldable / tablet screen — and pick a tile size (4–64 px, square or not). The layer becomes a grid of cells the size of one tile.

In Draw mode you paint pixels straight onto the map with your normal tools. When your strokes fill a cell that was empty, that cell forks its own tile. Tiles that turn out identical are merged automatically, so a shared wall or floor only has to be drawn — and fixed — once, and the tileset stays small.

Stamp, flip, and rotate​

Place mode lays a chosen tile into a cell. Pick a tile from the grid in the panel, then tap or drag to stamp it, with Flip H, Flip V, and Rotate 90° (for square tiles) for variety. Tile 0 is the empty tile — place it to clear a cell.

Every edit and placement is a single undo / redo step, and the whole tilemap is saved in your project, so it rides Drive backup and reopens exactly as you left it.

Export a game-ready tileset​

Tap Export tileset and Dixel writes two files, then opens the share sheet with both:

  • A sheet PNG — every tile in a grid — to Pictures/Dixel.
  • A map JSON in our dixel-tilemap format — the tile size, the grid, and each cell's tile index with its flip / rotate flags — to Downloads/Dixel.

The sheet imports straight into Tiled, Godot, or Aseprite: point the tileset importer at the PNG and set the tile size. The JSON describes the arrangement, so your own loader (or a small converter) can rebuild the exact map.

One tip: if you send the sheet over a chat app, attach it as a file, not a photo. Photo mode can rename it to .jpg or recompress it and drop the transparency; as a file, the PNG arrives byte-for-byte.

Tilemap editing and export are Pro. See the tilemaps guide for the full workflow.