Feature Request: A Big One, But Could Prove To Be Very Helpful

Aseprite is a very professional art program used to create 2D Pixel Art and is used by many professionals as their own way to create art. Most professionals are usually in teams, and I believe that these teams could and would benefit a whole lot if Aseprite implemented this feature that may seem scary at first: Live Collaboration.

I know, it sounds scary. A lot of work right? But believe me, this could spark so many ideas. Aseprite could stand out so much more in a crowd of art programs with a feature like this. Developers everywhere would be encouraged to use Aseprite, as collaborations would build a strong developer team, leading to a good game.

This is how I’d think it could work, but I’m not the expert here. Aseprite could have a system where the user has the choice to upload a public or private canvas onto a network. Hmmm…Aseprite Together, heh just a name idea. This network could act like Drawpile, private canvases would require a password in order to join the canvas, and anyone could hop onto a public canvas and make new friends while having fun, drawing together. There could be a user limit, to prevent canvases from going chaotic, and perhaps a live-chat? Anyways, I’d think this could be a great addition to Aseprite. Of course, this is merely just an option and users should have the ability to draw by themselves like currently.

Aseprite Together…What do you think?

A Steam system where you can invite a steam friend to join your canvas would probably take less time and be just as cool.

I’d argue that aseprite already stands out pretty well compared to the other pixel art programs on the market.

While this would be an enjoyable feature, I personally would prefer to see aseprite add or improve upon just about any other feature long before co-operative editing.

There are a lot of issues to tackle in regards to such a feature. Undo history for example, keeping track of what each user changes. If you draw and your friend ctrl-z’s does this undo what you were drawing, or perhaps it only effects changes he’s made, but what if you’ve drawn over what they were trying to undo, does it just eliminate what you’ve drawn to restore what he attempted to undo? etc.

In my experience having used some applications that support this sort of thing is more often than not a feature that has to be used sparingly otherwise it actually hinders workflow.

For example editing a still image is mostly fine, but when you move into the realm of animation it tends to get counter intuitive to have someone else making live changes to frames in your document you’re not actively looking at.

I’m not saying it can’t be useful, or that I wouldn’t want this. But compared to other prospective features personally I think it’s of little importance, especially when a lot of team oriented workflow improvements can be had with organized use of a repository or cloud storage service and screen sharing.

Thank you for pointing it out. I did not very well think about problems like that, although minor problems have easy solutions, there will also be major walls to climb over and I would not enjoy the overworking of the Aseprite devs for something not entirely necessary. I do still believe a feature like this would be enjoyable, but the workload may not be worth it. Thank you for replying!

yeah man, I hope it didn’t seem like i was trying to crush your idea or anything, I do genuinely like this idea, it could provide a lot of fun.

The last thing i used that had this sort of feature was craftstudio, which allowed users to edit pixel art textures, make 3d models, and code all cooperatively. It had some very interesting benefits, but also some pretty big downsides that you had to watch out for.