The 17th of August marks 6 years since the launch of Coloring Pixels, and 7 years of ToastieLabs! With your continued help every year, we have been able to make Coloring Pixels bigger and better, we cannot thank all of you enough for helping us get this far! Our Flagship game that keeps ToastieLabs running and allows all of us here to keep making games for you all to enjoy. 💖

It has been yet another amazing year for us here at ToastieLabs! Since the last anniversary, we have managed to make a new DLC each month Coloring Pixels whilst continuing support for WooLoop and hexceed! Jack has drawn 12 new books for you since last time with even more yet to come! More Coloring Pixels books are coming to the Nintendo Switch and we have had a whirlwind of a time with the development of our newest game Skystead Ranch which is due to come out next year.

Thanks to everyone who we met in person at MCM Comic Con London last October and a massive heartfelt thank you to everyone who backed our development on Kickstarter - both of which were brand new experiences for us here at ToastieLabs and we can't wait for more.

Your support has allowed us to expand our artist team with the addition of Laura! A much-welcomed change to the team that has been vital to the development of Skystead Ranch and freeing Jack up to continue providing pixel art for you every month - Thank you to Laura and Jack! 🤗

To celebrate yet another huge milestone: We have added a new free bonus image to Coloring Pixels, we are hosting the 6th annual pixel art competition, and all* available ToastieLabs games and DLC on Steam are at least 20% off all week long!

DLC that is within a month of release can not be included in the ToastieLabs sale*

We are proud to still be growing as Games Studio as we are approaching 4 years of full-time ToastieLabs this September. We are stoked about where we are going as a small British Games Studio and are glad you are all along for the ride. We couldn't do this without you all.

• Continued Support - Each year, our little game portfolio gets not so little, and we are so happy that we have managed to continue support and development for Coloring Pixels, WooLoop and hexceed, all of which saw new DLC and, with the exception of WooLoop, more porting to the Nintendo Switch!
  
• Laura - Hiring a second artist has been an amazing adventure for us all as we not only get more diverse but are learning the advantages of having multiple artists allowing us to spend time on different projects at once.
  
• Skystead Ranch - Our newest title Skystead Ranch has been an absolute rollercoaster! Learning how to communicate with potential publishers, branching out on our marketing techniques and watching our small Creature Collector Prototype grow and evolve into the game in early Alpha we have today has been a great adventure for the whole team. We invite you to check out Skystead Ranch here and wishlist it to keep up with the ever-developing news!
  
  • MCM Comic Con London - We took Skystead Ranch to MCM Comic Con last October and it was an amazing journey! A whole week in London where we got to set up a booth and share the news on Skystead Ranch in person. We even met a few of you who recognised our Studio from our other games, thank you for stopping by!
    
  • Kickstarter - As part of this, we ran a Kickstarter campaign, another first for ToastieLabs, and you managed to raise a staggering £20,000 for our development of Skystead Ranch, we can't thank you enough and can't wait to give back to you all with the best Creature Collector we can make. ❤️

Coloring Pixels has continued to be your favourite game and the game that ensures we can keep making games for you all to play.

We want to take this moment to thank Jack for his hard work to bring you hours of enjoyment. He creates pixel art every single month that you enjoy in a variety of themed book DLC!

And, of course, thank you as always for buying the DLC month after month and supporting us to make even more!

As the passion continues for Colouring Pixels on the go, we have managed to set just enough time aside in this hectic, busy year to ensure Coloring Pixels: Collection 4 will be coming to the Nintendo Switch very soon!

Another small mention on hexceed. Your love for hexceed hasn't changed a bit and we are very thankful and humbled by this! Our little puzzle game continues to outperform expectations and another year of hexceed has been in development as per your request - thank you!

Year 4 of hexceed is nearly done with 6 more DLC!
https://gtm.you1.cn/storesteam/app/2767660


We love that you love WooLoop! After a full year of WooLoop DLC last year, we listened to your feedback and continued the development of yet more DLC!

6 more DLC have been created this year with the 5th instalment coming out next month!

If you haven't already, check out the store page here and give it a try!
https://gtm.you1.cn/storesteam/app/1878910/


Skystead Ranch has been the focus of the year for us here at ToastieLabs!

A Creature Collector that captures your heart. We have cut Skystead Ranch back to its bare bones and rebuilt the whole game back up from scratch since the Kickstarter push last October. The whole team has been hard at work creating content, finding marketing opportunities and essentially creating a whole new game from the ground up.

With our ambitious branching out in the 3D world, we have had so much fun creating cute creatures we call Skylets and can't wait to have you all along for the ride very, very soon!

Check out the game on Steam now and wishlist it to be kept up-to-date with our plans and progress, we're getting ever closer to that release date!
https://gtm.you1.cn/storesteam/app/2399570/


As always, every Coloring Pixels Birthday is dedicated to you, our community.

Since last year, our community has continued to grow and develop and we are very excited about what we have achieved together. You guys are amazing <3

Social Media - Twitter was already a good place to go for interaction between us and the community but it has been exciting to see the continued growth of our Twitter, thank you!

Discord - Our Community Discord server[discord.gg] has almost doubled in size to just under 2000 users this year! This is the best place to chat with us directly as the whole team uses this server during the weekdays. A huge thank you to our moderators, helpers, and community as a whole for keeping this a safe space for everyone to hang out.

Reddit - We have a ToastieLabs subreddit! Still small and cosy but we post regularly with updates for those of you who prefer this format.

YouTube - We have kept the Dev Blog going all year due to your support and love of the weekly videos! Now at 3600+ Subscribers, we have recently started uploading our Livestream VODs and even super long versions of our Dev Blogs for you to relive the early days on ToastieLabs in 9-10 hour long videos.

Twitch - Livestreaming[www.twitch.tv] is something we only recently started doing more seriously. Stop by on a Friday every other week to watch one of us do something Game Dev-related live! You can even subscribe and get some ridiculous Twitch Emotes of Jack's face.

Patreon - A huge thank you to everyone on our Patreon[www.patreon.com], the love and support from Patreon has grown and grown with every year, and we cannot thank you enough <3

A special mention to our Patreons for their contribution to Coloring Pixels by voting on what DLC they want to see each month!

Merch - We have kept this going since last year and have since expanded our range! New hats, new mugs and new posters! Thank you to everyone who has purchased merch and is representing our Games out in the real world!

With ToastieLabs, there is always more!

Coloring Pixels will see another whole year of DLC next year, hexceed and WooLoop will be finishing up their years of DLC this December and we'll be checking with you all about the directions you want to see these games take.

WooLoop will likely be coming to the Nintendo Switch and who knows what we can do with the Dev Kits we have for both Xbox and PlayStation. 👀

Skystead Ranch is penned to come out in January 2025, that's only 5 months away! (Don't panic)

Check out Skystead on Steam, Epic[store.epicgames.com] and Nintendo Switch (soon.tm) - adding the game to your wishlists on any/all of these platforms will help us out immensely, so thank you in advance for doing this. 💝

For those of you who backed us on Kickstarter or continue to back us on Patreon (or both for some of you amazing people) - keep an eye on your inboxes in the coming months for access to Beta keys to play-test Skystead Ranch before anyone else.

To everyone else, keep your eyes on our Socials and your toast warm to keep up-to-date with what is coming next!


Continuing the tradition! The 7th annual Coloring Pixels art competition is here! For anyone who isn't aware, this competition is the chance for you to get your own pixel art into Coloring Pixels! The winners of our previous competitions have their art in the Community books which you can play right now!

For more information on the competition and how to submit your art, follow this link: https://www.toastielabs.co.uk/post/coloring-pixels-6th-anniversary-pixel-art-competition

All ToastieLabs games and DLC are on sale this week to celebrate the anniversary!

Don't miss out: https://gtm.you1.cn/storesteam/bundle/10532/Coloring_Pixels_Collection/

It's not a Birthday without a cake! We have added the 6th bonus book Birthday Cake to Coloring Pixels for you to enjoy for free!

We realised our mistake last year by having a 5th-anniversary cake with only 4 tiers, so this year's cake has the appropriate Cake to Year ratio!

Come and celebrate with us!

• Re-re-re-re-re-re added the competition button! - The yearly pixel art competition is back! We added a button to find more info and have shifted the exit button a little to make room for it. Get submitting if you want your art to make it in the Community 7 book!
  
• Added a new free Bonus Book Image! - It's not a birthday without cake!

• Updated the Credits to include new Patreons - thank you <3

To celebrate the 6th anniversary of Coloring Pixels, we’re hosting another competition!


Now is your chance to get your own pixel art in Coloring Pixels!


The 20 winners of this competition will have their pixel art featured in a free update to Coloring Pixels. It's very easy to enter; keep reading to find out all the information you need. When you're ready, click on the link at the bottom.


The deadline is the 11th of October 2024 at 17:00 UTC, the winners will be announced on the 18th of October 2024 via a blog post on our website, Steam announcement, Discord, and Twitter. Links to the socials can be found on our website[www.toastielabs.co.uk]!

We need to make sure that your pixel art is compatible for use in Coloring Pixels. To help improve your chances, we have come up with a few simple rules for you to follow and some suggestions to help you get started.

• You must submit an image of file type PNG. Sadly, PNG is the only image file format supported by Coloring Pixels. Other formats can easily be converted to PNG through most image editing software and online converters.
  
• The image must have a maximum dimension of 300x300 pixels. As you will have noticed, the larger images in Coloring Pixels take exponentially more time to complete. Although we know a lot of you prefer larger images, we don't want levels taking weeks to complete.
  
• Submission must have fewer than 100 different colors. The fewer colors, the better for Coloring Pixels; so try to keep to as few as possible. It isn't easy to know how many different colours there are in an image, so if you accidentally submit more than 100 colors it will be alright (we will need to pass your image through a filter). Some applications such as Aseprite let you create a color palette (which we recommend) which allows you to keep track of colors easily. If you choose an application such as paint.net we recommend sticking to the pencil tool over using paintbrush tools as they can often create numerous different shades of colors in an attempt to blend with the background.
  
• You must submit pixel art. A simple but important rule, the artwork you submit must be in the style of pixel art, resized photographs or graphical art will not be selected if no pixel art alterations have been made to the image.
  
• You must own the art piece. Please don't submit on behalf of someone else without their permission, please make the art piece yourself for this competition. We check to see if the art you submitted belongs to someone else as we cannot use people's work without their consent.

• Size doesn't matter! As long as you keep within the 300x300 image dimension limit you won't be penalised for submitting a smaller image. We will be judging submissions based on aesthetics and not complexity. For example, submitting an image of size 10x20 will be judged equally to one of size 150x200.
  
• "Which software should I use?" We recommend using either Pixaki (used by our Artist on the iPad to make Coloring Pixels levels), Aseprite or Paint.net (free). All are very powerful pieces of software that are more than capable of creating pixel art for this competition. That being said, you can use whichever software you want, as long as you can draw and produce a PNG file it should be good enough.
  
• "I've gone brain dead... I need inspiration!" - We can't choose for you, but you can draw anything. If you can't think of anything new or inspiring, try drawing something you love (film, game, pet fish, lasagne) or even something on your desk (Keys, a book, the framed ToastieLabs Poster you got from our merch store).
  
  • If you want to submit a photograph of your cute pet, we recommend resizing it in your art software of choice and tracing over it on a separate layer to recreate your cute companion in pixel art.
    
  • If you wish to generate image suggestions with AI, that's fine too! All we ask is that you use it as inspiration and make the piece yourself.
• "Can I submit multiple times?" Yes, don't hold back! Submit as many images as you like. We will judge each image anonymously and individually.

https://forms.gle/Xwt43FgYiUYUJoDK9