Hello. I was just wondering, has anyone ever tried making a game with programmatic pixel art? What I mean is, instead of using a spritesheet, this individual would have used an array (for example) to map out a sprite in the program and draw them with pixels using a graphics primitive function.

// Basic example using C++ syntax
pixelArt[3][3] = {
    {'1', '1', '1'},
    {'1', '0', '1'},
    {'1', '1', '1'}
};

// Output (the ? represents a pixel drawn by a graphics function)
// ???
// ? ?
// ???

However, the aim would be to output something like this:

Does it make sense to try such a method if the sprites are generally small and simplistic? Or is it better to just use a spritesheet (texture atlas)? It might be a fun project for me if it proves to be practical.

Has anyone ever tried to do that, you ask? Oh yeah. I can guarantee you that in the medieval ages of computing people were routinely hardcoding graphics directly in their source code like that.

You may want to have a look at the XPM format, a text based bitmap format that is also actually valid C code defining palette and pixels as arrays. Some editors even recognize it and can turn into bizarre text editor / image editor hybrids:

Well the thing is that things like gimp can directly load and save XPM images so you can just edit them like normal images and then just #include them in your code. You still have to decode them into an RGB format before you can use them anyway, so I'm not sure it's really very useful.

If you really want to embed images directly into your executable, you might be better off just including images in PNG or JPG in your code using something like bin2c and using stb_image (a full featured image loader that fits entirely in a header file) to decode them.

Thanks for the responses and recommendations. I've never heard of XPM before. I might try this later, after I've wrapped up some of my other projects.

Hello. I was just wondering, has anyone ever tried making a game with programmatic pixel art? What I mean is, instead of using a spritesheet, this individual would have used an array (for example) to map out a sprite in the program and draw them with pixels using a graphics primitive function.

Sure. It's not very practical because it goes the exact object direction of separating assets from code, but yes, it's been done.

Advanced automated examples of this are systems like Visual Studio's and QtCreator's resource-packing wizards that load arbitrary files from disk and convert them to code so they can be baked into the resulting DLLs or EXEs.

There are even projects that have gone further, and use algorithmic rules to generate the assets procedurally.