ZPainter (hosted on itch.io) is a toy painting program in Godot. It’s being created as one of several desktop apps in a work-in-progress game about programming that features a faux retro desktop environment (more to come on this soon!).
What started as a toy/experiment has wound up with a life of its own! I’ve been learning a lot about image manipulation and the complexities of generating brush tips. So far, ZPainter has wound up taking more of my time and care than most of the rest of the game… but I’m not mad at that. I love this little thing.
Colors
One of the unique features of ZPainter is that all drawing (and in fact the entire UI itself) is in black and white, with Gradient Map shaders providing the colors. When you modify a color in the palette, you’re changing the stops in an underlying gradient which is supplied to the shader. This means that the entire UI changes as you change the palette. Loads of people* are saying this is an “eyesore” and “an affront to art” but I find it charming
*people that i’ve made up
