Lets start by saying, this is not affiliated there are no referral codes, no one has asked me to write this etc I just really love this tool. For the longest time I’ve been a pretty average pixel artist its one of my main gripes as a game developer. The lack of being able to produce high quality assets that I can use in my games without having to either buy them or pay fairly expensive royalties this was of course until I found this image editor specifically for pixel artists called Pyxel. (check our their site here)
As a programmer there are a few features that mainstream options didn’t have or weren’t readily usable without addins or ui digging that Pyxel just had the main one for me was the ability to create a tile-set docent which would set each tile in the grid as its own image but allow you to edit all the images together in a single file and the ability to load in premade pallets 8 and 16 bit pallets (one of the secret tricks to making better art restrict your colour selections with a hard defined pallet like dawnbringers)
Here are some of the features they talk about on their website:
- Tile references with transformations Draw in one tile and they all update instantly. Tile instances can be rotated and flipped, still referencing the same tile data.
- Animations Make animations easily and export them as sprite sheets or animated GIFs. Onion skinning helps with aligning things between frames.
- Tileset importing Pyxel Edit can import images of tilesets or mockups and identify all the unique tiles automatically, allowing you to edit and rearrange old tilesets or doing edits of mockups easily.
- Tilemap exporting Export your canvas tilemap in XML, JSON or plain text format for super quick game prototyping. You can also repeat the last export operation with a keypress, to quickly re-export for small changes.
As a whole I have found this to be one of the best pixel art editors out there, its simple enough to pick up and use without lengthy tutorials, its powerful enough to create an entire games worth of assets, relatively cheap for what it does, with full pallet and pallet swap support and a bunch of other powerful features.