After watching several videos on the topic of pixel art, researching some of the artists in the top of my search results, I decided to make the leap and change up my graphics creation strategy. For me, personally, it took quite a bit of time to figure out how to compile the software from scratch (because I had to compile some of the dependencies as well), but without further ado, here we go.
Step 0.0: CMake
I started off like normal, I guess, cloned the repo, and got to work inspecting the files, README, INSTALL, etc. I went through the process for several minutes only to find out that my version of CMake (installed like sudo apt install cmake was several versions behind the minimum requirement. I ran cmake --version only to find out that I was running version 3.10 when the minimum requirement is 3.14. So if you already have CMake 3.14 or above, you can skip this step. Otherwise, here’s how you update.
First off, you’ll want to get rid of any old versions of cmake by running sudo apt remove cmake. After that, head over to https://cmake.org/download/ to grab yourself an updated copy of cmake. I ended up downloading the source code and building from scratch, but that’s not completely necessary because there are several pre-built binaries available as well.
Step 0.1: Clone that Repo
This one’s pretty straightforward. Just make sure you have git installed and run git clone --recursive https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite.git
The next step is getting all of the tools required to build Aseprite. This can be found in INSTALL.md
Step 0.2: Get your tools
This is the very first step in INSTALL.md. There are step-by-step instructions inside that pertain to every operating system. Just be sure to read them carefully! This is the part where you install cmake, but just be extra sure to check your version by running cmake --version. If you don’t have version 3.14 or higher, refer to step 0.0.
Just to reiterate, the command to install all your dependencies in one go is sudo apt-get install -y g++ cmake ninja-build libx11-dev libxcursor-dev libxi-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libfontconfig1-dev again, just make sure to double check your version of cmake.
Step 0.3: Make sure you have Skia
This one was a little tricky because this dependency wasn’t actually covered in the dependencies install command from step 0.2. It very well may be because Skia is actually a graphics library made available by Google, and thus, not available on traditional linux repositories. More information on the Skia project can be found at skia.org.
Inside the INSTALL.md file that you got when you cloned the aseprite repository, there are some notes regarding the moment you run cmake. You have to run it from inside the build/ directory (which you’ll need to create), and you will need to define where you have either compiled or decompressed your copy of Skia. The example directory (the default defined in the provided cmake command) is $HOME/deps/skia/ or something similar.
You can either compile skia yourself using the step-by-step guide provided by the team at Google, or, conveniently enough, the team behind Aseprite has a precompiled binary just for you! All you have to do is drop it in your $HOME/deps folder and continue with the steps to compile. Aseprite’s precompiled binary of skia can be found at https://github.com/aseprite/skia.
Step 0.4: Run CMake
Once you’re done cloning the repository, you’ll want to go inside it with cd aseprite. Next you need to create a folder to build your files inside of, since builds inside the source aren’t allowed. mkdir build && cd build/.
The basic syntax of cmake is cmake [path/to/source/containing/CMakeLists.txt] [OPTIONS]. So from inside your build directory, you’ll need to define the source (one folder up). Then from there, you’ll need to tell cmake where your skia files are. More information on this can be found in the INSTALL.md file
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo \ -DLAF_BACKEND=skia \ -DSKIA_DIR=$HOME/deps/skia -DSKIA_LIBRARY_DIR=$HOME/deps/skia/out/Release-x64 -DSKIA_LIBRARY=$HOME/deps/skia/out/Release-x64/libskia.a -G Ninja ..Step 0.5: Run Ninja
Almost there! Once you’ve build all the files using cmake, and you didn’t encounter any errors, congrats! You’re almost there! If there are any more errors to come (in my experience) they’ll be on this very last step. The last command in INSTALL.md is ninja aseprite. That will actually start the build process and end up spitting out an executable binary that you can launch once everything is finished running.
Step 0.6: Run Aseprite!
./aseprite and enjoy your fresh copy of Aseprite!