8192px icon indicating copy to clipboard operation
8192px copied to clipboard

A collaborative pixel art experiment

8192px - A collaborative pixel canvas that grows over time

8192px is a little pixel art experiment for the web where users have to work together to fill out the canvas as the timeouts in-between being allowed to place a pixel makes it hard for a single person to fill out the canvas.

The rules are quite simple:

  • The canvas starts out at 2x2, and grows by 2x2 every 8192 seconds of users being active.
  • After placing a pixel, a user must wait a deterministic random amount from 0 to 8192, the scale of the value depends on the number of active users.

Mouse and keyboard controls:

  • Click and drag to pan.
  • Shift/Control click to zoom.
  • Double click to place a pixel.

Touch controls:

  • Drag to pan
  • Pinch to zoom.
  • Double tap to place a pixel.

You can see it in action at http://8192px.co, the server is a droplet hosted over at DigitalOcean.

The server is written in Node with the only dependencies being mime and ws. Due to the lack of a good image library for node, it pipes bitmap data through convert, which needs to be available on the server.

The client has no external dependencies, and should run fine in any reasonable modern browser.