Software with Tiles

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.

Crocotile 3D places pixel art tiles in 3D space to build low-poly scenes and models, exporting to common formats.

Pro Motion NG is inspired by Amiga Deluxe Paint and used in commercial game studios. It has a detached-window interface, deep palette and tile tools, and an animation workflow tuned for sprite production.

PuzzleScript is a browser engine where an entire puzzle game is a short text file: a legend of characters, a set of rewrite rules, and the levels drawn as ASCII. Games run and share as a single link, which has made it the usual home for small tile-based puzzle experiments.

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.

Sprytile is a Blender add-on for building low-poly scenes by painting with a tilesheet: pick a tile, draw on a grid in the 3D view, and it makes the geometry and maps the texture as you go. It suits the tile-textured look of early 3D games.

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.