Maintained Software

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The most popular voxel editor: fast, small, and with a renderer good enough that most voxel art you see was rendered inside it.

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.

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.

rx is a pixel art editor for people who live in a terminal. It is modal in the way vi is - keys are commands, not tools on a palette - and everything is configurable from a text file. It handles layers, animation strips and palettes, and exports sprite sheets.

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.

Asset Forge makes models by kitbashing: drop blocks from its kits into a scene, snap them together, recolor them and export the result as a model or as rendered 2D sprites.

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.

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

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.

Laigter builds normal maps and other lighting textures from 2D sprites so they can be lit dynamically in a game engine.

A classic free chiptune synth plugin with pulse, triangle and noise voices, pitch and volume sequences, and modern DAW compatibility.