TL;DR:

• Pixel art readability challenge with 94 icons to draw in 8×8, 16×16, and 32×32 sizes.

• Two new cassette tapes in synthwave and lo-fi genres.

• Archive folder for inactive tutorials.

• Let me know if you find the readability analysis discouraging.

Continuing from where we left off with the Pixel art size tutorial, this update brings the new Pixel art readability challenge.

It's similar to the Draw Quickly challenge in that you draw one of the 94 subjects Pixeltosh can recognize, but this time on a small pixel grid.

It uses the same readability analysis introduced in the last lesson of the Pixel art size tutorial, where Pixeltosh tells how easy it was for it to see the subject.

Note that you still get a checkmark, even if the recognition didn't work. The Pixeltosh uses a small neural network that is not specialized at reading pixel art and especially has trouble with the smallest 8×8 size where a lot is left to interpretation. Please let me know how you feel about this challenge, especially if it makes you feel discouraged if your icon doesn't get recognized. I'm trying to see if the feedback is useful enough to be included, even though it's not too intelligent and can fail at small sizes.

In other news, I also added two new cassette tapes so you have some more music to listen to while you're going through the icons.

Holizna's tape is in the lo-fi genre whereas Jospeh Sacco's two albums (one on each side) lean on synthwave. You get them after completing the Simplification and the Shape language tutorials respectively.

Finally, I've gotten quite some feedback on things disappearing from the Drawing app. This was a feature of the Study Plan update, aimed at decluttering the tutorials section, but turned out to be too confusing and not intuitive how to access the completed content again. I really appreciate you letting me know about this because it was something I wasn't sure myself if it'll be clear enough.

I've now opted into a more straightforward solution where the inactive tutorials move into a separate Archive section so you always have access to them.

Check out the devlog if you want to see behind the scenes of how the readability challenge was made:

And again, you're very much encouraged to give your honest thoughts on the readability analysis, what was your experience with it like.

Thank you and cheers!
—Retro