# Bit Studio — Modern Pixel Art That Loops Forever
*2026-10-17 — Announcement — By Kim*
> Bit Studio is the successor to Bit - Animation Editor, rebuilt around cycles of loops on our Blastwave engine: every export loops seamlessly, compositions add depth, Focus mode generates starting points, Unreal Engine 5 gets a native plugin, and the whole thing ships through CI/CD instead of by hand. Coming soon.
{/* Before publishing: the release date and the Steam link (no app id yet). */}
Remember [Bit - Animation Editor](/games/bit-animation-editor)? It's back, and it has grown up. Meet **Bit Studio**.
That's not a video, by the way. It's the scene itself, playing in your browser. More on that further down.
## Where Bit came from
When I made the old Bit Animation Editor, I thought I'd make maybe one or two versions, for myself only. It started as an art project.
Then it grew, a bit organically: it needed export targets, and it needed to run on more platforms. It leaned heavily on manual deploys and packages, so it was hard to maintain and hard to support users with. The interface was rough to manage too: a heavily stylized Dear ImGui on top of SDL's built-in 2D renderer.
We saw quite a few more users in the age of NFTs... but also from other artists. And one feature came up more than any other: **seamless looping exports**. In the editor and in game engines a scene always looped forever, but the GIFs, MP4s and the rest didn't loop seamlessly, and there was no simple way to fix it, because Bit had no notion of loop cycles or timelines.
## Built around cycles of loops
Having hacked a bunch on music apps (DAWs, and hardware, more on that later perhaps), I took that idea and structured Bit Studio around **cycles of loops**. You keep the creative freedom to animate and compose however you like, and it still always produces a seamless loop.
A part always plays a whole number of times inside its parent: a 10 second composition in a 60 second scene plays 6 times. Change how many times something loops and its speed changes, never its length. So every export loops, by design.
The new editor. Every lane in the timeline is a loop, and the x1 on it is how many times it plays inside the scene.
## A real engine underneath
I also took the time to make [Blastwave](/news/blastwave-cross-platform-gpu-engine) and to study cross-platform graphics pipelines. So now we have control over the GPU and the shading pipeline, and that unlocks a modern art pipeline: lights, darkness, glow, shader distortions and post effects, all on the pixel art. Bit now leans heavily on the new engine.
Even the particles follow the loop: they're closed-form in the loop phase, which is a fancy way of saying snow that falls forever and still lands back where it started.
## Compositions
Bit Studio comes packed with most of the pixel bits I've made over the years. It also comes with shaders, distortions, effects and one powerful new concept: **compositions**.
A bit on its own is a sprite sheet with a range of animation capabilities. A composition goes one level deeper: an arrangement of artwork and effects combined into a more advanced set piece, which you then place on the scene, again and again. So with little means you get a lot of complexity and depth in the animation.
One of the founding visions for Bit was to create highly detailed pixel-art robotic machines. Now that comes with full control of the loop cycles, and modern effects on top.
Themes, masks and type came along for the ride. Art is stored as 16 gray levels and a theme maps them to colors, with 460 palettes from [Lospec](https://lospec.com/palette-list) built in. Masks shape the artwork, and text is baked into the art like a sprite sheet, so lights and distortions treat letters as pixels too.
## AI, if you want it
When Bit Animation Editor was made, LLMs and AI weren't nearly as widespread as they are now. So we took some time to add an MCP server for the entire engine, and an in-editor AI chat: describe what it should try to compose, with your own agent, and pick from the designs it renders.
## Focus mode
That's fun and all, but I'm more excited about the... *drum roll*... **Focus mode**.
It's a scaled-down mode where you basically turn off all the UI and just focus on generating and exploring with the built-in randomizer. (Kids, before AI there was classical procedural generation. [RymdResa's](/games/rymdresa) entire universe is crafted that way.)
One potential art blocker is getting started. With strong randomization you can simply generate a starting point, then take charge and refine it by hand into something greater. Press **R** for a new roll, **T** to transform what you have, and move to the left edge of the screen to see the rest of the keys.
## Gamepad
Lazy composing with a gamepad can be a lot of fun: setting up looping animations and compositions from the couch. The hard part is staying away from the randomizer and just seeing what it makes.
## Native Unreal Engine 5
The old Bit supported exports to Unreal too, but it leaned on the engine's own 2D implementation (Paper2D sprites, flipbooks and so on), and that brought quite a lot of complexity and performance issues. We learned that the hard way in [Lunar Soil](/games/lunar-soil), where bits are used for a range of things: 2D art in the game, UI screens and more.
Now Bit Studio has a native Unreal layer that makes bits first-class citizens in Unreal's shading and material system, with Blueprint events exposed as well. It's super simple: drag and drop a bit into a level and it just works, with the lighting, the looping and much better performance. We're using Bit Studio actively in Lunar Soil.
Here's Pump Triangle in the Unreal 5 editor, on a card in a closed room. The red on the walls and floor is Lumen picking up the scene's own glow:
We dropped Unity support. Honestly, I couldn't bother with it anymore: it's not an engine I use or believe in, and dealing with C#, no thanks. We support Unreal for now, and maybe Godot and Bevy down the line, after Lunar Soil's release.
## Made for sharing
Social media sharing also got a big revamp. Now that the NFT crypto bros have calmed down a little, it feels like a good time for proper sharing support.
I've personally stopped using most social media (life is kind of too enjoyable to be chronically online), but I still feel the urge to share artwork. And the problem was the same there: it was quite some work, and nothing looped seamlessly.
So now there are MP4, WebP, GIF and APNG exports, size-limited versions that fit Discord, social videos in square, 9:16 and 16:9, link-preview images, icons and stickers, and even a kit with every image Steam asks for. Everything is scaled up in whole steps, so the pixels stay crisp, and every file is whole loops. Here's Void Cog as three of them, straight from the Export window:
WebP · 512 px · 2.1 MBGIF · 256 px · 954 KBAPNG sticker · 320 px · 482 KB
The MP4, and one loop in every other format, are on the [Bit Studio page](/bit-studio).
## Sound that loops
Audio support is good for social media, and for ambience in games. I spent quite some time on a very simple looping function: take basically any MP3, or a song you made, press the button, and it loops. It's not as perfect as doing it by hand, but it needs no AI: it finds the beat (and the BPM), picks a good seam and crossfades it.
The next step for audio is better event triggers, and maybe distortion effects that react to the beat. That puts some pressure on the integrations, Unreal and the rest, to have good audio input, output and trigger support. An adventure for the future.
## Web components
I like web components; they feel fresh, like native JS. So there's an exporter for that too. It evolved from the original Bit's HTML5 canvas support, but now it's actual WebGL2, frame for frame what the app renders. Every scene in this post is one of them: tens of kilobytes of JSON and sprite sheets instead of megabytes of video.
Maybe we'll do a three.js export as well, but three.js is center stage for all the AI-slop games right now, so I think I'll wait a bit. It's cool to see all the AI game-dev stuff happening, and I think some great games will come out of it, but it depends on the designer and how they compose their outcomes.
## Built to last this time
One of the major issues with Bit Animation Editor was the deployment process: we simply didn't have a deployment pipeline. Now it's fully CI/CD, cross-platform, all the way to Steam. And we've killed off heavy legacy packages, like the mighty ffmpeg: every encoder now lives in our own engine.
So bugs, support and maintenance should be way easier to manage, and Bit Studio can keep evolving.
## Coming soon
Bit Studio is coming to Windows, Mac and Linux (and the Steam Deck, if it makes sense). There's a [gallery of artwork](/bit-studio) made in it, all of it playing live, and the [app page](/games/bit-studio) has the full feature list. I will ship it when it's done.
The Unreal plugin still needs a home it can ship to automatically. Fab has blocked our publisher account because we didn't update our American tax form, for the fifth time. We'll see how it goes. The W-8BEN: the horrors of publishing.
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*Canonical URL: https://morgondag.io/news/bit-studio-coming-soon*