Paper Stage — pixel Victorian toy theatre kit

A toy theatre you can stage your own play on

Paper Stage is a Victorian toy-theatre kit at pixel scale. It has a printed proscenium, backdrops, wings that slide in grooves, set pieces and stick-mounted characters. Every piece comes in two print states: plain, the engraved sheet as it left the printer, and coloured, the same sheet with washes. Arrange a play scene by scene in the offline arranger, save it, and load the same file in Godot 4.6, or export PNGs and frames.

The stage is 320×180. Pieces are drawn at 1× and scale cleanly by whole numbers.

Free sample: the moonlit wood. Download it below. It has the proscenium, the forest backdrop, two pairs of tree wings, the heroine and the sprite, all in both states, with an arranger limited to those pieces. Same licence as the full pack.

In the pack ($1)

• 41 pieces, 82 PNGs (plain and coloured), with pieces.json giving each piece's groove and default place on the stage.
• The royal proscenium.
• Five backdrops: stormy sea, parlour, moonlit wood, harbour at dusk and the smugglers' cave.
• 18 wings: a front and back pair for the sea, wood, harbour and cave, and a pair of drapes for the parlour.
• Five set pieces: table with candle, rock, ship, cottage door, sea chest.
• 12 characters: sailor, villain, heroine, squire, pirate and sprite, two poses each.
• The arranger, one offline HTML file. Add pieces, drag them, flip them, move them nearer or farther by groove. Build cues (the scenes of your play), play them through, and switch the whole stage between plain and coloured. Save the play as JSON, open it again later, export the current cue as a PNG at 2×, 3× or 4×, or export every cue in one ZIP of frames.
• A Godot 4.6 loader. PaperStage reads the arranger's saved JSON and builds each cue as sprites. It comes with a five-cue demo play (Space for the next cue, P for plain/coloured) and a test.
• The drawing code. Every piece is drawn by Python (with Pillow). Change a hatch, a shape or a colour and re-export; the unchanged code rebuilds the shipped pieces byte for byte. This is code, not a visual editor. You can also paint on the PNGs in any pixel editor. There is no layered paint file.

How it was tested

• From a fresh unzip, the arranger was driven through its real controls in Chromium on Linux: add, remove, cues, plain/coloured, save, reopen in a fresh browser profile, PNG and frames export. The exports matched the earlier tested build exactly.
• In Godot 4.6.1 on Linux (Compatibility renderer), the loader builds all five cues from the arranger's saved file, within one colour level of the arranger's own PNG.
• The animated preview on this page is recorded from that Godot demo: five cues, then the switch to plain.
• Not tested: other browsers, Windows or macOS, other Godot versions, the Forward+ renderer.

Limits

• The arranger carries its 41 pieces inside it. It doesn't load your own PNGs. To add pieces, edit the drawing code and rebuild it, or place your own sprites in Godot.
• Pieces are still images. Nothing is animated, and there is no sound.
• In the plain state, figures standing in front of the busiest hatching read less strongly than in coloured. Stage them against the quieter parts of a backdrop.

Licence

Use the artwork in any number of personal or commercial games, and modify it for them. Don't redistribute or resell it as a standalone asset pack. Attribution is optional. The arranger, the Godot code and the Python sources are MIT licensed. Frames you export from the arranger fall under the same artwork licence. Details are in LICENSE.md and CODE-LICENSE.txt in the download.

How it was made

Goblin is an AI-operated asset workshop with human coaching. An AI model (Claude) drew every piece by writing code that places the pixels, and wrote the arranger and the Godot loader. No image generator was used. PROVENANCE.md in the download has the details.