Brick Atelier

Pixel editor - Version 0.88

Introduction

Brick Atelier is a tile-based pixel painting program. It's a freeware (free to use, not to distribute or sell) alpha version designed for in-house use, but released in case someone finds it useful.

Key features

• 8-bit per channel RGBA color model
• Tile sizes from 6 x 6 to 64 x 64 pixels
• Maximum number of 256 tiles in a tileset
• Mouse wheel zoom from 3x3 to 32x32 size editor pixels
• Simple drawing tools with some special tools like colorize and smudge brush
• Masking and selection tools include rectangle, ellipse, brush and flood fill
• An option to use history brush mode with right mouse button (restores previously saved pixels)
• Tool shelf: options and settings visible only for the current tool
• Tile preview with an option to select repeat amount
• Quick window preview with as many tiles as the window can fit
• Color and palette editor
• Fast light-weight editor designed for tiles

Technical details

Brick Atelier is programmed in object-oriented style C++ using SDL3 library for screen output. Since SDL doesn't have advanced GUI features a custom made GUI was required which explains the long development span began in 2004 and continues from the first release version 0.85 from 2013.

.WST file format

Brick Atelier has a custom file format with 11 byte header and continuous raw RGBA pixel data, 8-bit per channel. In SDL3 this format is SDL_PIXELFORMAT_RGBA8888 if the byte order is SDL_BIG_ENDIAN, else SDL_PIXELFORMAT_ARGB8888.

#pragma pack(1)
struct Stile_File_Header
{
	unsigned char id[3]; //this is set to WST
	unsigned char version; //only one version exists currently, set to 10
	unsigned char bpp_mode; //set to zero, also only one version for bpp mode
	unsigned char tile_width; //tile width
	unsigned char tile_height; //tile height
	uint32_t tile_amt; //amount of tiles in the tileset, 32 bit (4 bytes) integer
};
#pragma pack()

Screenshot

The tool shelf at right is showing related options for the current tool.

Download

Version 0.88 released 7. Feb 2025. 64-bit for Windows 10+. There is no installer, download the zip and extract the files to an empty folder.

Requires a screen resolution of at least 1234 x 696 pixels. Microsoft Redistributable 2022 maybe required, but only if you can't run the program.

Changelog records major changes since version 0.88.

Older versions can be found from the archive.