For a chance to win this DLC for FREE, join our Discord and enter the competition!
WooLoop: Our Newest game is available to try now!
We are very excited to announce we have a new game due to be released in January 2023! WooLoop is in a similar style to Coloring Pixels and a Demo is available to play right now with the October Next Fest!
We have a new project, WooLoop, that will come out early next year! If you love Coloring Pixels, you need to play this! Wishlist the game here and follow along with our progress https://store.steampowered.com/app/1878910
New Game Announcement: WooLoop
WooLoop
If you already follow game development updates, you may have seen snippets of WooLoop in our Dev Vlogs over the past year. A project Rob started in his spare time last Christmas!
A different take on our beloved game Coloring Pixels. The same relaxing and rewarding game feel but this time in a more creatively expressive manner!
What is WooLoop?
WooLoop is a game of creation. You build up great works of art by dragging your yarn in loops around various pins in your canvas. Slowly, one thread at a time, patterns will form, until eventually, you construct a beautifully woven masterpiece.
Wrap, weave, and wind your wool! Build works of art strand by strand, one loop at a time, in this tranquil game of craftsmanship. Draw inspiration from the large exhibition of levels available and unwind with the soothing soundtrack.
Follow Our Progress!
WooLoop is still a work in progress. Make sure you check out our Weekly Dev Vlogs on YouTube as well as Wishlisting the game on Steam to be kept up to date with all of the progress we make!
We are planning to hold weekly Developer Broadcasts here on the Steam store page every Friday around 1 pm British Time so make sure you tune in for live interaction about the game!
Milestone updates will be available here on our Website and on our Social Media.
Release Date
We are preparing to offer a Steam Demo during the October Next Fest next month!
The full release of the game will be in early 2023, with exact dates to be confirmed
Patreon
A message to our Patreons, as promised in your tier offers, we will be releasing early access build to our Toastie Heros a few weeks before release and a Beta Access build to our Toastie Members shortly after!
If you are not a Patreon and are interested in playing WooLoop early, take a moment to check out our Patreon tiers!
Announcing the Flags 2 DLC
Announcing the Flags 2 Book DLC
This Flag-themed book unlocks 20 additional levels for Coloring Pixels! The second flag book but this time with a twist!
Each image shows a part of the world map, and each country in that area is depicted in the colours of that nation's flag!
Available for the price of $0.99, £0.79, (or your regional equivalent). The pack will release on the 9th of September at 19:00 UTC/12:00 PDT.
The 17th of August marks 4 years since the launch of Coloring Pixels! Even after all this time, the continued, lasting support and growth of this community still overwhelms us and we cannot thank all of you enough for helping us get this far! <3
It has been another milestone year for us here as ToastieLabs! Since the last anniversary, we have maintained the steady release schedule that we implemented in the previous year and we have managed to add 12 additional DLC books to Coloring Pixels! From Retro to the most recent Bakery book! That's 240 new levels, not to forget the free r/Place book which has caused a lot of you original players to return to our game!
As a result of the growth you have all permitted, we have been able to expand our small team (2 people) to be not quite as small - we now have a full-time artist who can dedicate even more time to Coloring Pixels! We have plans to continue the support for our community and aim to make another year of DLC, along with some requested feature updates from you, our community.
To celebrate this momentous milestone: We have added a new free bonus image to Coloring Pixels, we are hosting the 4th annual pixel art competition, and all* available ToastieLabs games and DLC on Steam will be 20% off all week long! DLC that is within a month of release is not included in the ToastieLabs sale*
ToastieLabs Games Studio Growth
We are still a fledgling Games Studio as we are approaching 2 years of full-time ToastieLabs this September. We are very proud of what we have managed to achieve in this short time with your help!
4 Huge milestones!
We have started releasing our games on Nintendo Switch, both hexceed and Coloring Pixels!
We have changed from a Self-Employed studio to a Limited Company (boring I know, but an important step for us)
We are moving into a new much bigger office! We hope to be there a while, so it will be nice to have somewhere to call home for the next few years!
Lastly and more importantly, we have hired a 3rd member of our team! Jack, a Junior Digital Artist!
Coloring Pixels Changes
Most of the Coloring Pixels DLC work was handed over once more, this time Lee is passing the responsibilities of Coloring Pixels over to Jack, our new Full-time Digital Artist. For you Coloring Pixels lovers, this means that the artwork in-game can be more consistent and more importantly, better altered with your feedback. I strongly recommend you join our Discord server where Jack regularly interacts with our members to seek feedback, improvement and ideas! For us as a games studio, it frees up Rob and Lee to focus on supporting all our games regularly as well as developing brand new, more ambitious titles!
The new DLC process has been refined!
As we are sticking to a monthly release schedule for new Coloring Pixels books, we are very quickly going through the list of ideas we originally had. In order to address this, we have included the community in our 3 step decision-making process! Make a Suggestion - You can send us your suggestions for book themes in any format! Be that email, Steam Community, Discord or Twitter! If we like it, we pop it in our Discord Server Discord Voting - All the ideas get put in a big long list on our Discord server, anyone in our Discord can add reactions to the ideas they want to see next in Coloring Pixels! Patreon get's the final say - The top 5 reacted suggestions in the big list, get sent to our Patreons in a monthly poll, to thank our Patreons for going the extra mile to support us, they all get to vote on which of the 5 ideas they want to see next month! So if you have any suggestions, let us know, get voting in Discord and your idea could be the next one we make for Coloring Pixels!
Nintendo Switch!
After our learning process last year with hexceed - we were very excited to jump right in with a Nintendo Switch build of Coloring Pixels: Collection 1
We were cautious of the change in sale format from Steam to Switch but you have received the game so well that we have already made a start on Collection 2! So thank you for enjoying our game and we look forward to providing you with more Nintendo Switch content!
hexceed
Another small mention on hexceed. We are still very excited by the love and attention you have given to hexceed! Year 2 of hexceed has been a blast and we will be reviewing our options for another year in the coming months!
A step into the unknown! We created a brand new game, Who Shuffled My Shapes? A Rubik's cube-inspired puzzle game with 20 different shapes for you to enjoy.
The purpose of this title was for us to trial a number of things, an experiment if you may.
Firstly we wanted to dip our toes into the world of 3D Games, although this game is very light, it was still a good practice ground to get familiar with the ins and outs of a 3D environment.
Secondly, we wanted to see how well a different pricing model will be received by our community, a game with a set price instead of a Free-to-Play with DLC - we believe for a game of this scale, we should look at alternative options that what we provided.
Finally, and most excitingly, we tried out the Steam Next Fest! This is a regular festival held by Valve for new titles to all be put into the spotlight with a week of free demos, developer live streams and community interaction - this was incredibly fun for us to do and something we will certainly be looking at again for future releases!
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.
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 has continued to grow beyond what we expected. We now have over 1100 of you in our Discord and chat with us and each other every single day! It really makes the work we put in worth it to get instant interaction with you, from your suggestions and feedback to jokes and special server roles! 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! Drop by to see the inside of the development process from week to week. Almost reaching 2000 subscribers on YouTube (1995 to be exact as of writing this) is way more than we ever imagined.
Patreon - A huge thank you to everyone on our Patreon, we set this up after months of requests from you offering to support us in more ways than just buying our games. We did not expect much from it but we are absolutely blown away by the support you give and cannot thank you all enough - approaching 2 whole years of support from some of you means so much to us, 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!
More to Come!
We are just getting started! Coloring Pixels will see another year of DLC, hexceed is finishing up Year 2 in December and we will be looking for your input on what to do next, more games will be coming to the Nintendo Switch - and most excitingly, we have a number of brand new, unannounced games in the works which will be coming throughout 2023!
So keep your eyes on our Socials and your Toast at the ready to keep up-to-date with what is coming next!
The Annual Pixel Art Competition
Continuing the tradition! The 5th 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://steamcommunity.com/games/897330/announcements/detail/3362519627202806205
Anniversary Sale!
All ToastieLabs games and DLC are on sale this week to celebrate the anniversary!
To celebrate another year of ToastieLabs, we have added a brand new FREE Bonus book image to Coloring Pixels! This is the most Coloring Pixels Cake yet - hand drawn by our very own Artist, Jack!
4 tiers, 1 for each year of Coloring Pixels. Using the color palette of the game logo and representing different book themes on each layer!
Come and celebrate with us!
Coloring Pixels V1.18.0 Patch Notes
New Features
Added a free new image "Birthday Cake 4" to the Bonus book.
Re-Re-Re-added the “Your Art” button to the main menu so you can enter the competition!
Added some brief details about this year's pixel art competition.
Added links to more details and how to submit to the pixel art competition.
Made the Exit button smaller to make room for the Your Art button.
Added a "Total Pixels Colored Counter" on the settings page. The number increases by 1 for every pixel you correctly color! Unfortunately, this is not a statistic we have been tracking since before this update so all players will start at 0.
Add a new "Highlight Palette Text" accessibility setting (Default to off) - When enabled, the numbers on the palette get an extra highlight around them, to make it easier to read the numbers in dark colors.
Added an additional UI element on the main menu to highlight which book is currently open.
Added Linux Support, a highly requested feature!
Bug Fixes and Misc
Fixed a bug where the number 1 could incorrectly appear on the pallet when you have "Remove Completed Colors" on and "Lock Completed Pixels" turned off.
Updated Credits page to add our newest team member Jack.
4th Anniversary Pixel Art Competition
Details
To celebrate the 4-year 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 14th of October 2022 at 17:00 UTC, the winners will be announced on the 21st of October 2022 via a blog post on our website, Steam announcement, Discord, and Twitter. Links to the socials can be found on our website!
Rules and Suggestions
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.
Rules (the dull bit):
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.
Suggestions
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 Aseprite or Paint.net (free). Both 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).
"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.
Submit Here
https://forms.gle/EDuStLt5omSHYaZZ7
ToastieLabs Birthday Sale!
5 Years of ToastieLabs, 4 Years of Coloring Pixels, 2 Years of hexceed! Who Shuffled My Shapes? joins the portfolio!
All of these are reasons for us to celebrate! To do so we have set up a ToastieLabs Steam Sale from now all the way to Monday the 22nd of August, 6 pm BST! That's a whole 7 days of discounts on all of our available games on Steam!
Now is the perfect chance to pick up that DLC you always wanted or to finish your ToastieLabs collection!
