Free Software

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.

lvllvl is a browser editor for character-based art. It covers PETSCII and a long list of other machines' character sets, with layers, animation frames, custom tilesets and palettes, and it can generate frames from an uploaded image or video. Projects save to the browser, to GitHub or to Google Drive.

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

Blockbench is a free and open source editor for low-poly models with pixel art textures. Models can be exported into standard 3D formats, to be shared, rendered, 3D-printed, or used in game engines or games line Minecraft. Modeling, UV mapping, texturing with pixel-art tools, rigging and animating, can all be done in the program.

Blockbench has a clean and beginner friendly interface, but also offers lots of customization and advanced features for experienced 3D artists. Plugins can extend the functionality of the program even further.

GrafX2 was made for DOS and has been ported everywhere since. It has tools no other program does, constraints for retro platforms, and an antiquated interface.

PixelForge is a font editor built for pixel fonts: draw each glyph on a grid, set the spacing and kerning, and export a TrueType file that installs like any other font. It can also import an existing TTF - if it is genuinely a pixel font it detects the size and loads the glyphs back onto the grid for editing.

Piskel is an open source editor that runs in the browser, with layers, animation and a public gallery. Development has stopped, but it still works and is a common first editor.

Pixelorama is a full featured free editor: layers, animation with onion skinning, tile mode, palettes, and an active development pace. It runs on every desktop platform and in the browser.

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.

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.

LÖVE is a small, well documented Lua framework with nearest-neighbour filtering and canvases that make pixel-perfect rendering easy.

Moebius is an ANSI art editor from the Blocktronics scene, with collaborative editing, character palettes and 16-color and iCE color modes.

Novaboard runs in the browser and as a desktop app, with layers, animation and effects.

Petscii Cola is a free, basic PETSCII editor which can save raster images and Commodore 64-playable files, as well as convert raster images to PETSCII, multicolor or hires Commodore 64 images.

It also includes a choice of Commodore 64 palettes, and a gallery of PETSCII art.

Paint.NET is a free image editor for Windows with layers and plugins. It has no dedicated pixel art tools but is a common starting point.

Pixly is a game-oriented pixel art and animation editor for Android, with the gestures worked out for a touchscreen: two fingers to pan and zoom, three to change the brush size. It covers layers, onion-skinned animation, symmetry, real-time tiling and cloud sync. Its own site is still up and still points at Google Play as the only way to get it, but that listing no longer resolves.

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.

GraphicsGale has been in use since 2005 and excels at animation, with onion skinning and frame-by-frame preview. It was made freeware in 2017. The interface shows its age but the tools are precise.

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.