Export formats

Pixploder's whole export suite lives in one place: the collapsible Export panel at the bottom of the right rail on Step 8 · Reconstruct & View. It ships ten formats, and every one is assembled in your browser from a single shared snapshot of the current scene — so your PSD, your engine package, and your sprite sheet always agree with each other, and none of them spends a credit or makes a network call. Exporting works offline. This page is the per-format reference: what each file contains, which tool opens it, and the handful of rules that decide exactly what lands inside.

Where the Export panel lives

The Export panel is pinned to the bottom of the Step 8 right rail, directly under the Layers tree. Its header is a toggle: click Export to collapse or expand the whole panel, and while it is collapsed the header shows a 10 formats hint on the right. The panel opens expanded on one primary button — Export PSD (layered Photoshop) — with three format groups collapsed beneath it, so you land on the single most-used format instead of a wall of ten choices.

Those three groups are section toggles, each with a count badge:

• Game engines (5) reveals the Unity button plus Godot, GameMaker, RPG Maker, and Spine.
• Pixel editors (1) reveals the Aseprite button.
• Universal formats (3) reveals Texture atlas, Cropped PNGs + JSON, and Full-size layers.

All three start closed. Open every one and all ten format buttons stack in a single column.

While an export is running, its own button shows a spinner reading Building… until the download fires. The layered PSD, the Unity package, and the packaged formats each run on their own lock, so they never block one another — but the eight packaged formats (the four other engine targets plus Aseprite and the three universal buttons) share a single lock, so starting any one of them disables the rest of that group until it finishes. The Export PSD button carries one extra condition: it stays disabled until the scene actually has sprites.

What every file contains

All ten formats read the same snapshot of your scene, so placement and stacking never change between them. From back to front, that snapshot is: the inpainted background as the farthest-back, full-document layer; a single ground shadows plate — a multiply layer that unions every sprite's contact shadow from Step 6 · Shadow; then each sprite as a cutout at its box position, with its base shading and ambient occlusion already baked in. Layer order is paint order — index 0 is the bottom — and it matches the top-to-bottom order of the Step 8 Layers tree exactly. Group membership travels with each sprite, so the formats that understand folders (PSD, Godot, Aseprite, Unity) rebuild your group tree; the flat formats simply ignore it.

Three rules decide what makes the cut:

• The approval gate. Once you have picked (✓) any sprite in Step 5 · Mask Sprites, only approved sprites export. A project with zero picks exports everything — there is nothing to gate on yet.
• Hidden rows. A layer you hid with the eye in the Layers tree is dropped from every export except the PSD, which keeps it as a hidden layer you can switch back on.
• Texture filtering follows the output, not your upload. Pixel-art and repixelized scenes export with crisp nearest filtering; soft-styled scenes export with smooth linear filtering. The fuchsia baked · nearest / baked · linear chip in the Step 8 preview header — shown once a Step 7 · Harmonize bake is applied — tells you which one your files will ship with.

When the output is soft (linear), the packed atlas and Spine sheet use a wider gap between frames and edge-extrude each frame's border, so smooth sampling can never bleed the transparent gap into a sprite's edge. Pixel-art scenes keep the tight pack instead. You never set this — it follows the same nearest/linear choice as the chip.

Photoshop — the layered PSD

Export PSD (layered Photoshop) is the flagship, always-visible button. It downloads pixploder-layers.psd: a fully layered document where your groups become real Photoshop folders (nested, collapsed on open), each sprite is an editable positioned layer with its shadows baked in, and a group's mask exports as a Photoshop group mask. Beneath the sprites sit the raw materials — an Original scene layer, the editable Background folder tree, and a Ground shadows multiply layer; when you masked elements out of the backdrop, a hidden Background (scene minus elements) layer with a non-destructive mask is included too. Eye-hidden rows carry over as hidden layers.

This is the only format that preserves the editable background patch tree and the raw "scene minus elements" layer — every other format flattens the backdrop to a single image.

Game engines

Five engine targets. Unity has its own prominent button at the top of the section; the other four sit below it. Every engine ZIP also ships a README with exact paste-in steps for that engine.

• Export to Unity (.unitypackage) downloads pixploderdiorama.unitypackage, a Unity 6 package. It contains a Sprites/ folder (the background plus one PNG per layer), a PixploderDiorama.cs component, and a ready pixploderdiorama.unity scene. Every layer becomes a Single Sprite placed in 3D by the same diorama depth model you rotate in Step 8; groups become empty parent objects, and the parallax spread is tweakable in the Inspector.
• Export to Godot 4 (.tscn + PNGs) downloads pixploder_godot.zip — a pixploder_godot/ folder holding a text scene.tscn (format 3), a sprites/ folder, and a README. Each layer is a Sprite2D with nearest or linear texture_filter and an absolute z_index for paint order; groups are Node2D parents, the ground-shadow layer uses a multiply material, and every sprite carries a pixploder_depth value (0 far … 1 near) for parallax.
• Export to GameMaker (assets + GML) downloads pixploder_gamemaker.zip: the images and a scene.json as Included Files, plus a scr_pixploder_build GML script. Calling pixploder_build_scene() rebuilds the scene at runtime on asset layers — depths step down from 15000 for the background by 10 per layer, so higher layers get a lower depth and draw in front. It deliberately never touches the fragile project format, so it works on every recent GameMaker version.
• Export to RPG Maker MZ (plugin) downloads pixploder_rpgmaker.zip: full-canvas stacked pictures numbered in paint order, a PixploderScene.js MZ plugin with Show Pixploder scene / Hide Pixploder scene commands, and a reference scene.json. The README also documents a manual Show-Picture path that works in MV.
• Export to Spine 2D (JSON + atlas) downloads pixploder_spine.zip: a skeleton.json with a loose images/ folder for the editor's Import Data path, plus a packed skeleton.png + skeleton.atlas for runtimes. One root bone sits at the document's bottom-center; each layer is a slot and region attachment in paint order, and the ground-shadow slot uses Spine's multiply blend. Spine's format has no folders, so groups are not preserved here.

Pixel editors

One native-file export, written straight from the file-format spec — no ZIP.

• Export to Aseprite (.aseprite) downloads a single pixploder.aseprite file with every layer editable. Your Pixploder groups are preserved as Aseprite group layers in bottom-to-top order, each non-empty layer becomes one compressed cel trimmed to its visible pixels, and the ground-shadow layer keeps a multiply blend. The document is clamped to 65,535 px per side — the hard limit the Aseprite format allows.

Universal formats

Three engine-agnostic hand-offs for custom pipelines — MonoGame, Raylib, Phaser, PixiJS, or a loader you wrote yourself. Each ZIP ships a README with reconstruction pseudocode.

• Texture atlas + JSON/XML downloads pixploder_atlas.zip: one packed atlas.png, plus atlas.json (TexturePacker "JSON hash", which Phaser 3 and PixiJS load directly) and atlas.xml (Starling/Sparrow — the same data). The full background stays off the packed sheet as its own background.png, because packing it would roughly double the sheet; it is still listed in the atlas metadata with its position. That metadata also carries every layer's paint order, depth, and blend for a custom loader.
• Cropped PNGs + JSON downloads pixploder_sprites_json.zip: every sprite trimmed to its minimum bounding box under sprites/, the backdrop as background.png, and a scene.json that spells out each sprite's top-left x/y, its center offset, size, z-order, depth, blend, and group. This is the standard hand-off for a custom engine.
• Full-size layers (ZIP) downloads pixploder_layers.zip: every layer as a full-canvas transparent PNG numbered in paint order, plus a flattened composite.png reference and a layers.json. Stack them all at (0,0) in ascending order, in any software at all, and the scene rebuilds with zero math.