TL;DR:

• Invasion project (a shmup game for PICO-8) unlocks after you complete Shape language.

• Customize the Invasion design document on the Pixeltosh.

• Chronoscope, a magazine with science fiction artworks for inspiration and reference.

• A new dynamic soundtrack song plays in Pixel art fundamentals and Invasion project.

After a bunch of theory around designing shapes, it's time to put things into practice by drawing sprites for a simple, single-screen shoot em' up.

It runs on PICO-8, so it's not a long project like the Pinball game, but it's not as simple as the Snake game either. The extra bit of functionality is that you have the chance to customize the design document for the game.

You can change every underlined word in the document …

… and adjust plenty of numeric properties.

The main thing is of course still to draw the sprites.

And you have a new magazine/book available if you choose to design your game with the science fiction theme.

Of course you get to play the game and tweak it until you're happy with the gameplay.

There was also a new song added to the game's OST (you can hear it when you don't have a cassette tape playing in the Music app) and I'm so happy with how it turned out. It appears at the end of the devlog as well:

I hope you will have fun coming up with creative ways to change the design. I can make it even more advanced in the future (multiple sprites for invaders, invaders that attack out of formation, rotating and animated sprites) as right now it's still quite limited, but of course there's a million other things to develop too, so I'll get back to new tutorials next.

Cheers!
—Retro

TL;DR:

• Shape language tutorial.

• Filled rectangle/ellipse tool by clicking again on the ruler.

• Redesigned look of picking up references.

You can now unlock the first tutorial in the Design fundamentals course (as soon as you complete the Elements of art: shape). In Shape language, you'll learn from 12 different games, how they use circles, squares, and triangles as the building blocks for their characters.

To aid you with drawing all the shapes, you can now click again on the rectangle or ellipse tool to get the filled variant.

I've also improved the display of references with better drop shadows, which should make exploring all the game cartridges more pleasant.

As always, I go behind the scenes in my devlog.

I hope you will enjoy this learning-from-examples approach. Soon you should be able to put this knowledge into practice as well.

See you then!
—Retro

• Elements of art tutorial on shapes.
  
• Ruler tool for drawing lines, rectangles, and ellipses.
  
• A detailed plan for the rest of Learn Mode.

• Artworks section will appear after you complete the pixel art evaluation challenge.
  
• Create custom artworks with up to 16 colors.
  
• Basic, monoramp, system, and modern palettes.
  
• Fullscreen artwork preview.
  
• Export the image as a PNG at varying scales.

• New dynamic soundtrack song for the Elements of Art tutorial.
  
• Pinball Creation Kit sounds.

• Renaming and removing of saved games.
  
• The Continue button in the main menu loads the game you last played.
  
• 10-pixel grid in the pinball editor.
  
• Option to use right-clicking instead of the back button.
  
• Customizable music effects.
  
• Many other bug fixes and polishing.