Show HN: Cobalt – a pixel-art painting studio for the Nintendo DS (benbridle.com)
Cobalt is a program for painting textural and expressive pixel-art on Windows, Linux, Nintendo DS, and in-browser. The same 46KB core executable runs on all platforms, with a thin emulator layer sitting on top to handle differences in inputs and filesystem access (which makes it easy to port between systems). It's built on Bedrock[0], an 8-bit virtual computer system I posted about here in July.
I created Cobalt because I wanted to draw messy, gritty pixel art without smooth gradients, and the smaller colour palette helped with making bolder colour choices. Images can be moved back and forth between platforms, so you can copy works-in-progress to the DS to keep working away on the bus or train. It's like a 2004-era vision of the future.
There's a live demo on the linked page that runs in the browser, and there are downloadable demos for every platform here[1]. Let me know if you try it out or have any questions!
16 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 41.1 ms ] threadWhen I put this much work in, charging a tiny/nominal fee feels like a barrier without a clear reason.
Younger users without payment methods and those on a budget will not engage with what you built.
At $5, the income stream has to be miniscule, so why choose a $5 license instead of free with donations?
If you want to make money on this, all the thrilled users you currently have would have likely paid 2x or more the current price, so if making money from it is the reason for the cost, $5 is confusing. But $5 is also confusing as a cost of entry to something that could be widely enjoyed at no extra cost to you, and might bring you something good in return if it was free and not paid.
At $5 a pop I can't imagine you're getting much of anything, including attention or widespread usage.