Free Software

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.

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.

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.

ASCIIFlow is a browser scratchpad for drawing boxes, arrows and labels in plain ASCII, for diagrams that have to live inside a comment or a text file. There is nothing to install and nothing to sign into.

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.

Aseprite exposes a Lua API, and the community maintains large collections of scripts for outlines, palette tricks, exporters and more. This page collects the best known collections.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

FamiTracker writes music for the NES sound chip and its expansions, and exports NSF files that play on real hardware. Community forks (0CC, Dn) continue its development.

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.

FontStruct builds fonts by snapping shapes together on a grid, which makes it a natural fit for pixel and bitmap lettering. Finished fonts download as TrueType, and the site is also a large public gallery of fonts other people have built, most of which can be opened and taken apart.

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.

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.

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