nfty¶
Draw a handful of pieces. Get a collection of thousands.
nfty stacks layered pixel art into large collections. You draw a few options for each layer — a few backgrounds, a few bodies, a few hats — and nfty combines and colors them, giving every asset a fingerprint that proves it is unlike any other in the set.
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New here?
Install it, then build a small collection end to end. About twenty minutes.
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Trying to do one thing?
Short answers to real questions: make a trait rarer, stop two traits clashing, add to a finished set.
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Want to know why?
Why layers are drawn in gray, how uniqueness is counted, why a seed reproduces a collection.
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Looking something up?
Every screen, every keyboard shortcut, every command, every error message.
The idea in one minute¶
A character is stacked layers: a background, a body, eyes, an aura, a hat. You draw a few options for each. nfty picks one option per layer, stacks them, and that is one asset. Do it five hundred times and you have a collection.
The twist is color. Most layers are not drawn in color at all. You draw them in gray, and nfty reads the gray as lightness — how bright each pixel is — then supplies a hue at generation time. One gray drawing of an aura becomes a blue aura, a pink aura, a gold one, each keeping the shading you drew.
That is why a small amount of art goes a very long way. The five-layer Cat in these screenshots is thirteen drawings, and it can produce 699,840 distinguishable assets.
Everything is repeatable
Every collection is cooked from a seed — a word you choose. The same CookBook and the same seed always produce exactly the same collection, on any computer. Change the seed, get a different one. See Why a seed reproduces a collection.
Building or modifying nfty itself? The developer README lives in the repository root.