A new player-created tool just made things a whole lot easier for Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream players who want picture-perfect pixel art in-game. Living the Grid is an in-browser tool that maps images uploaded by users onto a recreation of Tomodachi Life’s Palette House custom pattern creator, allowing players to perfectly recreate the image as an in-game custom design. Created by Reddit user and Tomodachi Life player ClementGzl, the tool is free to use and doesn’t require users to make or connect an account to access it.
“I really wanted to get into pixel art in the game but didn’t find satisfactory tools to help, so I made my own,” ClementGzl said in a Reddit post announcing the tool’s creation. “It uses the game’s built-in colour palette by default, [which is] easy to find, or pick ‘auto’ to extract colours from your image. Click a colour and it highlights every cell using it on the preview. There’s also a paint-by-numbers option. You can select the brush size for the pixel / detail density.”
ClementGzl demonstrated how Living the Grid works using images of Mario, Tom Nook, and Bulbasaur, which are mapped to an identical pixel grid to the one found in-game. Once Living the Grid pixelates an image, players still have to visit the Palette House and painstakingly fill in each pixel themselves, but it’s certainly easier than trying to free-hand an image of Mario from scratch. Living the Grid even offers a helpful estimation of how long it will take players to recreate a given image in-game. (For example, I got an estimate of six minutes and 50 seconds to recreate the GameSpot logo I uploaded.)
Once players have recreated the image in-game via the Palette House, it can be applied anywhere the game allows custom patterns to be used: on clothing, Treasures, house interiors/exteriors, island objects, and more. But ClementGzl does warn that the game has its limits when it comes to custom designs, so players might want to be a bit picky when creating them.
“[The game has room for] 300 custom clothing designs, 100 for every other category,” the developer explained in Living the Grid’s FAQ section. “Go wild on clothes; be picky everywhere else.”