Software with Tilemap Export

Simple Pixel Art Editor is a free pixel art editor that runs in the browser, with no install or account needed. It covers sprite drawing with layers, mirror drawing and selections, frame-by-frame animation with onion skin and frame tags, and exports to PNG, GIF and sprite sheets.

It also includes tools for game assets: a tileset editor that generates Wang-16 and blob-47 auto-tile terrains from a base tile and exports Godot 4 TileSet (.tres) and Tiled (.tsx) files, a tilemap painter with an isometric mode, a palette library and an image-to-pixel-art converter.

It suits beginners and hobbyists making sprites and tilesets for small 2D games. The source code is MIT-licensed.

It covers the usual pixel art tools (pixel-perfect pencil with a stabilizer, shapes, paint bucket, gradient with dithering, lasso and magic wand selections, symmetry, a tile preview for seamless textures) along with layers, groups, blend modes, layer effects (outline, drop shadow, glow) and reusable components: a sprite drawn once can be placed on any board, and its copies follow it.

Palettes belong to each file: classic presets, the colors used in the drawing, palettes the user keeps, or .hex and .gpl files. Shade and lighten step along the palette’s ramps. A reference image can sit under the drawing to trace over, and the eyedropper picks its colors.

For isometric work it has a 2:1 grid that tools snap to, 2:1 lines, box, cylinder and pyramid tools shaded from the palette, extrusion of flat shapes into volumes, shapes drawn on walls or on the ground, staggered tile previews and images laid onto a face. A file can hold several boards side by side.

Exports: PNG at 1× to 32×, SVG with one path per color and the layers kept as groups, .aseprite files, tilesets for game engines (PNG sheet with a Tiled tileset and map), and the drawing as code (React, CSS, JSON or ASCII).

Its strongest areas are isometric pixel art and work that ends up in design tools or code: components and multiple boards for icon sets and UI assets, and SVG that pastes into Figma as vector shapes. It suits game artists making sprites, tiles and isometric scenes, designers who need pixel icons, and people trying pixel art without installing anything. It has no animation yet, and works best with a mouse or trackpad; tablet support is in progress.

Docs: baipix.app/docs

Pyxel Edit is a smaller pixel art program focused on tile editing: paint tiles once and every placed copy updates, then export the tileset and tilemap for your engine. It also handles simple animation.

Tilesetter takes a handful of hand-drawn tiles and works out the rest: corners, edges and transitions are generated into a complete auto-tiling tileset, which it can then export along with a map. It is aimed at the part of tile work that is repetitive rather than creative.

Its standout feature is built-in isometric tools: a 2:1 iso grid, pixel-clean lines that snap to iso angles, shapes that sit on walls and floors, and shaded cubes and cylinders drawn in a single drag.

It also has everything you’d expect for sprites and animation: a frame timeline with onion skin, per-frame timing and animation tags; pixel-perfect pencil, dither brush and dither gradient, symmetry and live outline; RotSprite rotation and free transform; custom brushes and shareable brush packs; a built-in pixel font creator with a Text tool; .hex palette import (works great with Lospec palettes); and export to PNG at any scale, sprite sheets with Aseprite-format JSON, and transparent animated GIFs.

One-off purchase on the Microsoft Store, with a free 30-day trial.