Software favorited by timconceivable

Aseprite is a pixel art editor built around sprite work: an indexed-color workflow, onion skinning and a timeline for animation, tilemap layers, custom brushes, and export straight to sprite sheets. Extensions and Lua scripts add anything it lacks. It is the editor most Lospec artists reach for first.

A general purpose image editor that can be set up for pixel art: nearest neighbour scaling, pencil tool, indexed color mode. Animation is awkward, but the flexibility lets you mimic advanced tools such as index painting.

BitFontMaker2 is a bitmap font editor that runs in a browser: draw each character on a small grid, set the widths, and download a TrueType file. It has been around a long time and stayed simple, which is why it is still the quickest way to get a pixel font out of an idea.

Bfxr adds new waveforms, filters and a mixer to the sfxr formula, and runs in the browser.

Bitsy is a tiny editor for making small worlds: a few rooms of 8x8 tiles, an avatar that walks around them, and short conversations with the things in them. The limits are the point - there is no scripting to speak of and two colours at a time - and a finished game is a single HTML file.

ChipTone builds sound effects from layered oscillators, envelopes and effects with a lot more control than an sfxr style generator.

GameMaker is a 2D-first engine with a built-in sprite editor and room editor, used by many of the best known pixel art games.

sfxr generates jump, laser, explosion and pickup sounds with one click, then lets you tweak the synth parameters. Every later sound effect generator descends from it.