Software for macOS

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.

Krita is intended for digital painting, but its pixel brush presets, indexed color filter and animation timeline make it a capable pixel art tool once configured.

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.

Arkos Tracker 2 writes music for the AY and YM sound chips of the Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, MSX and Atari ST, and for a handful of other machines. It comes with the player routines needed to get the music into a real program on those platforms, which is the part that usually stops people.

Asset Forge makes models by kitbashing: drop blocks from its kits into a scene, snap them together, recolor them and export the result as a model or as rendered 2D sprites.

BambooTracker writes music for the Yamaha YM2608, the FM chip in NEC's PC-8801 and PC-9801 machines, and its relatives. It has a full FM instrument editor alongside the tracker, and exports to the formats those machines and their emulators play.

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

Blender is the free 3D suite, and it turns up constantly in low-spec work: modelling and texturing low-poly assets, rendering 3D scenes down to a pixel-art sprite sheet, and building the turnarounds that hand-pixelled animation is traced from. Its add-on ecosystem covers most of the rest.

Blockbench models boxy low-poly meshes with pixel textures painted directly on them, plus animation, and exports to game formats.

Bosca Ceoil is aimed squarely at people who have never written music. Everything is on one screen, the instruments are chosen from a list, and the scale and chord helpers make it hard to play a wrong note. Blue is the maintained rebuild of the original, and it runs on desktop and in a browser.

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

DefleMask targets the Mega Drive, Game Boy, NES, PC Engine, Master System, C64 and more, exporting files that run on real hardware.

Defold is a small, free 2D engine that builds unusually light games for desktop, web, mobile and consoles from one project. It is scripted in Lua, ships as a single editor with no licence tiers, and its tilemap and sprite handling suit pixel art directly.

DragonBones was one of the first 2D skeletal animation tools, and for years the free alternative to Spine, with runtimes for the major engines and an export format several of them read directly. Development stopped some years ago, but the editor still runs and the runtimes are still around.

FileToVox converts things that are not voxel models into voxel models: meshes, point clouds, heightmaps, images and Minecraft schematics all become MagicaVoxel files. It runs from the command line, which makes it easy to put in a pipeline.

Furnace is an open source tracker that emulates a very long list of sound chips, from the NES and Game Boy to arcade FM, with VGM export and DefleMask compatibility.

GB Studio makes Game Boy and Game Boy Color games with a visual scripting editor and exports ROMs that run on real hardware and on the web.

GBDK-2020 is the maintained fork of the Game Boy Development Kit: a C compiler, libraries and tools targeting the Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Gear and more.

GDevelop builds games out of events - conditions and actions picked from a list - rather than code, which makes it a common first engine. It handles tilemaps, 2D lighting, physics and multiplayer, exports to web, desktop and mobile, and the underlying engine is open source.

A multi-purpose image editor designed as a free replacement for Photoshop. It can be configured for pixel art with the pencil tool, indexed mode and nearest neighbour scaling.

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.

GoatTracker writes SID music on modern machines and exports player routines that run on a real C64.

Godot has a dedicated 2D renderer with pixel-snapping, nearest neighbour filtering and viewport scaling options that make low-resolution games straightforward.

Goxel is a free voxel editor with layers, a procedural renderer and unlimited scene size, available on every platform.