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Today we have officially released the Lospec Gallery into a closed beta test! Members who backed our kickstarter or are current patreon members can now view the gallery and make submissions!

The full release will be coming very soon, once we've worked out the bugs and put on the final touches! Get hyped! Help us spread the word!

We did a huge update over the weekend to the Lospec server, both upgrading the operating system (and all-day torturous affair, only made possible by member Dannflor's technological and emotional support. We also pushed out big updates which switched a lot of processing from the main Lospec server to it's secondary file uploading server, which should speed up the website and cause less issues (though there's bound to be a few bugs to work out first, so let us know if you encounter any!)

The Lospec Pixel Editor is a free pixel art creation software that was released on Lospec since it's first release. It's improved a lot over the years (mainly thanks to community member Unsettled who made loads of improvements). A few others have contributed too, but we heard many times that people did not wish to contribute to the lack of an open source licence.

We've decided to release the software under GPL-3 to still maintain some control over how it's used, but still give contributors the right to use the software, including any future changes. We hope this will attract new contributors who can help us iron out some of the less intuitive parts of it, add some features that it's lacking compared to other editors, and port it to other systems such as mobile.

If you are interested, please check out the Lospec pixel editor repository on github, and join our development channel in the Lospec discord!

Lozpekamon Discord Game

I also open sourced a game I created for the Lospec Discord called Lozpekamon, where you catch monsters by reacting to them when they appear in discord chats. The old version is completely usable, but we are also working on rewriting it to not depend on the old Lospec Discord Bot code, so it's cleaner and easier to add to. Then we hope to add new features such as monster training, battling and more! Shout out to our member/patron Dannflor who is helping with the rewrite! Check out the Lozpekamon monster catching discord game repo on github.

In other Discord news, we're expirimenting with the new discord forums feature, which we may choose to expand, and impliment on this site, replacing our current forums, which are harder to manage and monitor. Help us get it started by joining our discord and posting in a few threads!

We're also running an emoji election right now, so if you'd like to contribute to the legendary Lospec emojis set, check out the #emoji-elections channel and submit your entry in the next couple days!

That's it for today, stay square!

I know it’s been a little quiet lately, but I’m still working hard on the Lospec Gallery, amongst many other Lospec updates, I’ll go into that in a bit. But first, I’ve got some not so great news.

Since Lospec started in 2017, we’ve been a completely free and ad-free website. For a few years the only money Lospec made was from it’s Patreon subscribers (for who I’m eternally grateful), which luckily has always been enough to cover the hosting costs for the site. This is great for supporting the site as it is, but it’s always been my dream and goal to continuously update Lospec with new features.

For the first few years, Lospec was a side project I did in addition to a full time job. A few years later I decided quit my job, take my savings and move somewhere cheaper, and focus on Lospec full time. Since then I’ve added the Pixel Art Uploader,Pixel Art Scaler, PNG Crusher, Jobs Board, and other tools, plus working on user-focused features such as accounts, likes, comments, articles, and content submission/approval.

It was my hope that over time the Patreon would grow to be enough to support me continuing to work on Lospec full time, but that has yet to happen. I attempted to add other revenue streams to Lospec such as the Shop, but that too made hardly any money. In 2020 I started to run low on savings, and decided to run a Kickstarter, which was pretty successful, raising over 200% of my goal. Unfortunately it’s not enough to support me forever, and since the patreon hasn’t grown recently, I had to think about other revenue streams.

And that’s where the bad news comes in: Lospec is no longer ad-free. I am very sorry to everyone, I promise you no one hates advertisements more than me, but it seems in this day and age the vast majority of people prefer ad-supported things over having to pay (which I do understand). So I’ve partnered with a company to place ads on various places on Lospec. Currently you will see an ad at the bottom of each page, and inside the palette list. Demand for them is still ramping up, but if all goes well they may be expanded to more pages.

Of course I want people to have the opportunity to avoid ads, so anyone who is a member of our patreon, even at the lowest tier (just $1), will not be shown ads. If you donated to our kickstarter, you will also not see ads until after the gallery is complete (plus an extension based on your donation tier). So if you love Lospec (or hate ads) perhaps you’ll consider supporting us on Patreon. It would mean a lot, and help a lot. You’ll also get exclusive updates, a cool icon next to your name, and more.

Onto more exciting news: Yes, the Gallery is progressing nicely. The display page for art is mostly done, and the submission form is working, just needs a bit more tweaking. We will soon be releasing the beta for all kickstarters and patrons to test out.

In other Lospec news, we recently added some small features such as the Palette List Dither Test, the Paralaxer (thanks to Jaman), and lots of little tweaks. I also tackled the user account spam, which had gotten out of control, and I’ve now removed almost 5000 spam accounts with help from CountMoriarty and Unsettled.

Our last exciting new update is our brand new Suggestions and Bug Tracker page. It’s hosted by Canny.io which made it very easy to implement, and luckily let me embed it within our website and link our user accounts on it, so posting on it should be very easy. Help us get it going by submitting/voting on suggestions and bugs! I want to hear what you have to say!

I think that’s it for now folks, thanks for reading! I’ll try for a smaller/sooner update next time!

We've just added a new feature, the Pixel Art Jobs board. This page currently aggregates job posts from 3 places: The #Jobs channel on the Lospec discord, the new job posting thread on reddit's /r/PixelArt, and posts from reddit's /r/gameDevClassifieds subreddit (with non pixel art posts filtered out).

If you're looking for pixel art work, this is a good place to start without having to run around to different places. Eventually this will be expanded to allow people to post jobs directly to Lospec, and include a place for portfolios and comissions, but hopefully people find this useful until then.

If there's any other places you frequent that might be good to include on this page, let us know!