Paid Software

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.

picoCAD 2 lets you make small low-poly models out of a handful of shapes and texture them with a single 128x128 texture sheet in a deliberately constrained toolset. Textures can be painted live in the program using a basic pixel art editor.

It also allows you to create simple animations and can be used to make larger and more complex models than the original picoCAD.

You can export renders, models and sprite sheets directly from it.

picoCAD builds small low-poly models out of a handful of shapes and textures them with a single tiny texture sheet, in a deliberately constrained toolset. Models and turntable renders export straight out of it.

LBIT is Extremely Lightweight

• a single 3.3 MB exe file
• uses ~2400KB of ram
• starts in 200 miliseconds

LBIT is Extremely Minimal

• No text or menus
• No buttons or windows
• Controlled with mouse / hotkeys
• No duplicated tools

LBIT Simplifies Pixelling

• no saving (instant autosave)
• no canvas sizes (infinite canvas)
• infinite history (undo all the way to the beginning)
• easy export of current selection / zoom level

LBIT has Cool Features

• tweak a color everywhere on the canvas live
• generate a gif of your entire piece from start to finish
• comprehensive mouse/keyboard shortcuts / combinations
• control the cursor with keyboard arrow keys

LBIT is Smooth

• - smooth transitions between zoom levels
• - drawing strokes optimized for smooth lines even at high resolutions
• - simple / clean cursors and background grid

But why? 

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

Pixquare is a pixel art editor for iPad and iPhone with a deliberately dense feature set: layers, animation, palettes, tiled preview and pressure-aware Apple Pencil drawing. It reads and writes the formats desktop editors use, so a drawing started on a tablet finishes anywhere.

Pixaki is a full pixel art studio for the iPad, built for drawing with the Apple Pencil rather than a mouse. It has layers, a proper animation timeline with onion skinning, palette tools and tiled preview, and exports sprite sheets, GIFs and layered files.

PICO-8 bundles a code editor, sprite editor, map editor, sound effect editor and tracker into one tiny virtual machine with strict limits that keep games small and finishable.

Picotron is a fantasy workstation from the makers of PICO-8: a small imaginary computer with its own desktop, file system and built-in tools - a sprite editor, a map editor, a tracker and a code editor - all inside fixed limits. It is roomier than PICO-8 and keeps the same deliberately constrained feel.

A standalone program for building isometric and top-down assets by extruding pixel art into 3D.

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.

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.

Deluxe Paint was the paint program of the Amiga era and the tool a great deal of 1980s and 1990s game art was made in. Its custom brushes, palette cycling and animation features set conventions that pixel art editors still follow, and its keyboard-driven workflow is why so many later programs feel the way they do. It is no longer sold; the versions that survive do so through archives and emulation.

Kenney Shape builds chunky 2.5D icons and sprites by stacking flat shapes and giving them depth, rather than by modelling in 3D. It is a fast way to get a consistent set of game icons, and exports both flat images and models.

PixelOver turns existing artwork, 3D renders and photographs into pixel art, with control over the palette, the dithering and the outline. It can rig and animate what it produces, so a single drawing becomes an animated sprite without pixelling every frame by hand.

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.

SpriteIlluminator generates normal maps for 2D sprites, either algorithmically from the shape of the art or painted by hand with its own brushes, so a flat sprite reacts to moving lights in an engine. It also does specular and emissive maps, and previews the result under a light you can drag around.

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.

inSIDious is a detailed emulation of the Commodore 64's SID chip as a plugin instrument, covering both the 6581 and the 8580 and the quirks that separate them. Three oscillators, the chip's filter, envelopes and a sequencer for the fast arpeggios the SID is known for, with several hundred presets. It runs in the free Reaktor Player.