Need pixel art software recommendations (it can be free or paid)
I've been learning Godot for the past few months and I'm happy to report that it's been going well. Little by little, things are clicking into place. (I hugely, highly, undoubtedly, recommend GDQuest courses)
I'm ready to start working on a small project to test out my skills, and it's going to be a top down pixel art game.
But to be completely honest, I suck at drawing. I suck at drawing as in, I can make stick figures at best. So forget any fancy software for drawing in general like gimp or photoshop.
What I'm looking for is a software meant for pixel art and that makes my life easy, in both drawing and animating. Bonus points if it allows me to trace (I'm not planning to copy/steal art, but I do need reference points, at least for now)
Do you guys have any recommendations? It can be free or paid. I don't mind paying as long the software is worth it.
I'm not really an artist myself but Aseprite and PixiEditor are popular and work well on multiple platforms.
Aseprite is the professional standard for game development pixel art; it's simple to use, very powerful and fun to look at. Godot and Aseprite both have addons to support the pipeline between the two. It's $20, but you can use it for free if you spend the time to compile it yourself. Pixelorama (itself made in Godot) and PixiEditor are also recent popular options.
I'm not much of an artist either - though I have used image editors a good bit for my purposes - but I will say, there's no reason why a lack of artistic skill should drive you away from GIMP or Photoshop specifically, or any other drawing software. The software you use won't make you better at art, aside from correcting some of your mistakes (i.e. brush stabilizers) and giving you different tools to play with.
Rather, different editors tend to be specialized towards different purposes. The ones I named are made for pixel art, Krita is made for painting, Clip Studio Paint for comics, Toon Boom for animation... GIMP is primarily made for general automated editing and not often used by artists, so I wouldn't recommend that!
You’re right of course. I just meant that what I want is a software with rails, you know? Something allows me to quickly understand how it works and quickly make some quick sprites.
I want to draw pixel art, so I want a software meant for pixel art, that confines me to that style. I don’t want a more versatile software that lets me do different art styles, because otherwise I would probably feel lost.
Basically, I want a bike that lets me go to the next village, I don’t want a helicopter full of bells and whistles because I wouldn’t even know how to pilot the thing.
Case in point, I thought that painting with Gimp was a more common thing, so goes to show how ignorant I am in this area lol
Thanks for the suggestion btw! If I pick it, I’m going to buy it to support the developers
You're not wrong, there are people who do it, but from what I've seen, it's usually because they have a personalized workflow or because they want to use libre software and don't use Krita for whatever reason.
Pixelorama is a decent alternative if you'd rather not buy a program right now. It's free and open-source (made with Godot even). If you're literally just starting out with pixel art and you don't want to buy anything yet, this is what I would recommend. Otherwise, Aseprite. (Also note you get a Steam key if you buy it from aseprite.org)
Aseprite's source code is actually publicly viewable and the license allows the code to be distributed and compiled by users. If you use Linux, Aseprite might already be available to compile via your package manager.
The git repo already provides instructions for how to build Aseprite on both Windows & Linux. It’s as easy as installing some prerequisites & copy/pasteing a command.
Aseprite, which others mentioned, is specifically designed for pixel art. It's good, but I wouldn't say it makes things easy?
I tend to use Affinity for most of my art instead. As of like a week ago it is free now also, so it doesn't hurt to give it a try. It takes some learning, like any professional software, but I found it great for making all the art for my Godot games. I tend to create the art in vectors first, then rasterize it to pixels as late as I can. Most other software does not natively support working on vector and pixel at the same time like Affinity. I think my art turns out better when I do that vs Aseprite, but I am not great at either lol.
To give a better explanation for why working on it is nicer:
I can have layers with different shapes, and scale or edit or rotate them perfectly, without effecting the other layers, and they will still be pixel perfect when I convert it later. Aseprite does support layers too, I just found them harder to work with, and their shape tools are not as advanced, and are not vectors, so they can get weird when you have to modify them.
I'm not exactly a professional, but I'm wrapping a project where I had made some environmental sprites and about 150 different equipment sprites/icons with RGB masks for recoloring. I also used Affinity Designer in a similar way to create vectors for several pieces. I wanted to throw another voice behind the idea that it's nice to have some assets in vector if you:
That said, often for really small resolutions, I would touch up sprites saved from the vectors for clarity. And, vector isn't always the answer, sometimes it's way faster to just do something in raster (purely with pixels.) There were also some things like complex RGB maps width gradients between the channels that were created or fine tuned in Affinity Photo. (Keep in mind, Affinity just combined all their tools into one app now.)
To be clear, I wouldn't recommend my workflow in it's entirety. It seems silly, but I haven't quite figured out the pixel art workflow in Affinity apps and kind of hated the feel of using them for laying down individual pixels, so I also ended up using Paint.net (Windows) for a lot of art as well, sometimes moving the art between apps. I also used Python to create the basis for some seamless animations. Also kind of silly: I used ezgif.com a good bit while working on animations, as I was outputting to webp. I meant to compile Aseprite, but never found the time.
I'm just offering this last bit of context to illustrate that you may touch multiple tools for slightly different jobs.
[Edit: importantly, I didn't care about fine-grain control over my color palettes for this project.]
Oh I have a very similar process.
Paint.Net was how I got started making most things before I moved to Affinity, so I am really comfortable using it for simple things. I tend to touch up pixel work in there instead of either Aseprite or Affinity because I know how to do things quickly in it.
I also do ezgif for doing promotional gifs. I screen capture from Godot and then use that to crop and reduce it down to what is allowed by itch.io.
What platform?
My own pixel art editor for macOS is available on TestFlight.
Linux and Windows
I used Krita for our gamejam submission. It's got a pixel brush and you can just make the canvas small and zoom in. It's not fancy but gets the job done. (and is free!)
If you just want to dip your toes in the water I'd still reccomend Piskel. It's not maintained anymore but is free, has a lot of features, and runs fine
Aseprite came up a few times. Libresprite is based on the last GPL-licensed release of the codebase, and is also very robust.
It saw some dev seven months ago but yeah, aseprite is probably the way to go
In my world there is a point in preserving code that is licenced (spelling?) specifically under the GPL or other strong copy left licence.
It's not about cost or availability but about freedom.
PikoPixel. I think it let's you set an image as a background but I'm not 100% sure anymore. No animation though.