GraphicsGale
Supports many formats, including .ico, .gif, .avi, .cur, .ani., preview your animations in real time while editing sprites - No need to stop working to watch your animation, use multiple layers to make drawing and editing your art easier, onion skinning allows you to see both previous and next frames while your draw, Output your animation frames onto a single sprite sheet, output each frame to its own image file, or export the entire animation as a single .gif file. GraphicsGale's export options are flexible enough to be compatible with any workflow, GraphicsGale also has many pixel-art specific features to help you create your work quickly and easily, including palette control, selectively erasing colors, and tools for quickly replacing and trying new colors. Free download, and get creating!
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Pixaki
Pixaki is the best pixel art app for iPad. It packs a whole load of features into a clean, modern interface, and it works great with Apple Pencil. So now you can make game sprites on the couch, animated backgrounds on your commute, or music videos in the park. Pixaki is packed with great tools dedicated to making pixel art. Drawing on the iPad with Apple Pencil feels smooth and natural. This is the most enjoyable way you can make pixel art. Turn on pixel perfect painting mode to automatically get rid off all those nasty double pixels when doing line art. This is going to save you a ton of time. As well as round and square brushes, Pixaki comes with the matrix dither brush with 13 different dither patterns. It works with the eraser too. The line tool makes it easy to create straight lines, which can optionally be locked to angles perfect for isometric art.
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Pyxel Edit
Pyxel Edit is a pixel art drawing application especially designed for working with tiles. Place tiles to form a level, edit them directly to see how they all work together, then export your tileset and the level data, and load it into your game. Tiles can even be flipped and rotated, still being editable and synced. This feature is inspired by the awesome Pixothello and Cosmigo Pro Motion, but taken one step further. It also supports making animations, and exporting them as sprite sheets or animated GIFs. Pyxel Edit was originally a free program, and the free version is still available. However continued development to make it a more solid and full featured application has taken a lot of the developers time so the next big update will be paid. Initially there will be a discounted beta version available to support continued development. Buyers of the beta will get the normal priced later versions without further cost.
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Aseprite
Aseprite lets you create 2D animations for video games. From sprites, to pixel-art, retro style graphics, and whatever you like about the 8-bit and 16-bit era. It has a color mode, which tell you how many colors the image can handle. All images in the sprite are in one specific mode, you cannot mix RGB images with Indexed images in the same sprite. It contains a set of layers. You can see them in the Timeline. The most important concept here is that there are two kind of layers: the background layer for opaque sprites, and transparent layers. A sprite can contain only one background layer, but several transparent layers. It contains animation frames. Each frame has a duration, i.e. how many milliseconds the frame must be on screen when the animation is being played. Integrate Aseprite in your assets pipeline with the command-line interface (CLI). Store several animations in one texture atlas.
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