Open Source 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.

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.

Pixel Composer builds effects, animations and generated art from node graphs, so a change to one input flows through the whole result.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

LDtk is a level editor with auto-tiling rules, entity definitions and a clean JSON format with loaders for most engines.

Petmate edits PETSCII images with the C64 character set and colors, and exports to formats the real machine can load.

Playscii edits and animates ASCII art with arbitrary character sets, converts images to text art, and has a mode for building simple games.

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.

TIC-80 is an open source fantasy console in the PICO-8 mould with a larger screen, several scripting languages, and built-in sprite, map, sound and music editors.