Pixel Art Editor

May 17, 2014 4:51 PM

I'm looking for a process or program for editing or creating pixel art, for sprite sheets and terrain tiles. I'm looking for recommendations.

I've been poking around with Pickle. I like it and the animation previews, but I wish there was a way to establish guides within the frame. I like the convenience of a simple export to a sprite sheet.

posted by edbles to Media & Arts (4 answers total)

Best answer: Aseprite is nice.
posted by wayland at 6:37 PM on May 17, 2014

I've been using Pixen ($10) for creating retro game art on the Mac and have been happy with my purchase. I haven't done too much animation with it but for simple spritesheets/animations it's been great.
posted by notpeter at 10:01 PM on May 17, 2014

Best answer: I came in here to recommend Aseprite too. It's a lovely little program.
posted by Lorc at 1:07 AM on May 18, 2014

I haven't done this in a while (no free time) but you can set up GIMP to be good for pixel art. It can be less convenient since it is a full graphics program and not specialized, but it also has an extremely flexible interface and animated previews and guides are all no problem.

Some helpful tips:

• Open the tool options for the eraser and choose "hard edge".
• Edit > Preferences > Toolbox -- go through and remove non-pixel-art tools which are cluttering up the toolbox (remove the paintbrush and airbrush and only ever use the pencil tool).
• View > New View -- created linked windows showing the same image at different zoom levels.
• Right click on your image > Filters > Animation, click on the bar at the top to "tear off" this menu so you can keep it conveniently open all the time to use Playback whenever you want to preview animations.

posted by anaelith at 4:56 AM on May 21, 2014