Behind the journal
Where the pictures
and numbers come from.
Everything in the journal comes from the project itself: its development notes, its code, recorded measurements and captures.
What you are reading
This is an edited account of PixelPunk’s development up to 25 September 2026. It is organised by milestone, so individual iterations are folded together. Chapter four jumps ahead to include the later texture work, because the material story is easier to follow that way.
PixelPunk is a desktop diorama builder made in Godot, with procedural town geometry and a cozy, playful, architectural look. The project notes use Tiny Glade as a reference for interaction and construction; there is no affiliation.
AI tools were used for implementation and review during development, and to write this journal. The project’s creator made the visual decisions.
Choosing the images
The project has thousands of screenshots, many of them taken to prove that some unrelated change left the picture alone. Most of those would add nothing here. The journal uses distinct scenes and close-ups, and shows matched comparisons only where they explain a visible change.
Every in-game image is an existing development capture, converted to WebP for the site. None of them are generated mockups. The lighting views come from different milestones and say so, and the construction playback is a short run of archived frames.
What the numbers mean
Each performance figure comes from a specific recorded experiment named in its chapter. Frame time, input-handler time, release cost and delivered light measure different things, and they can’t be added up into one claim that the game got some percentage faster.
The measurements and test results come from the development records; they were not rerun for this journal. A Windows export is recorded, but a successful export does not establish how the game behaves on Windows.
Where the story stops
The latest completed work covers the revised tree style, evergreens, planting animation and the smaller interface with a tray that hides after selection. The final chapter outlines the beautify plan dated 25 September; its proposed changes and acceptance targets are not completed results. Earlier chapters describe the versions shown in their pictures. The recorded game runs were on Mac, and the latest full tree-animation test run still had one known timing failure on battery. The subsequent interface change had targeted checks, not another full-suite run. Windows builds were exported but not tested on Windows.
Source excerpts
The linked excerpts are the original technical notes behind each chapter. They include source filenames and line numbers from the time they were copied; those may have moved in later versions.