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.

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.

Juice FX takes a sprite and generates effects such as shaking, flashing, outlines, dissolves and bounces as animated sprite sheets.

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.

LSDj runs on an actual Game Boy (or an emulator) and turns it into a four-channel tracker and live performance instrument.

Hexels paints on hexagonal, triangular and square grids with vector output, sitting between pixel art and vector illustration. It also animates.

Monodraw is a Mac editor for pictures made of text: box diagrams, flowcharts, trees and layout sketches that can be pasted straight into source code, a commit message or a README. It draws with real tools - shapes, lines, arrows, text boxes - rather than by typing characters into a grid.

Nanoloop is a music sequencer built around a grid rather than a tracker's note list, which makes it quick to sketch a pattern and hard to write anything conventional. It started as a Game Boy cartridge, where it synthesises sound on the console's own hardware, and also exists as a phone app.

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.

PixaTool converts images, sprite sheets and video into pixel art, with control over the output resolution, the palette, dithering, outlines and CRT-style effects. It works in batches and from the command line, which makes it useful for putting a whole folder of art through the same treatment.

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.

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

A particle editor that renders effects with pixel art constraints: fire, smoke, explosions and magic, exported as animated sprite sheets.

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.

Pixelmash takes high-resolution artwork - painted, photographed or rendered - and pixelizes it through a stack of layers whose settings stay editable. Change the output resolution or the palette at any point and everything downstream re-renders, which makes it a way to try pixel sizes rather than commit to one.

Pixen is a pixel art and animation editor built as a proper Mac application, with the same project openable on an iPhone or iPad. It is aimed at low-resolution bitmaps and 8-bit sprites: layers, palettes, an animation timeline and the system features a native app gets, like versions and autosave.

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.

Plogue's chipsynth SFC reproduces the SNES's SPC700 sample chip with its filters and effects, inside a regular DAW.

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.

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.