Pixel art tools!

richard on 2011/03/22 23:15

"Pixothello is a pixelling program used to make tilesets quickly and enjoyably."

He ain't kidding. Check out the short video in which he kicks the pants of all the other pixel-art tools I've used. I'm seriously considering doing a pixel-art game this time around just to use it :-)

It's Windows-only, sadly. Won't hold some of you back, I know, but it's a bit of a pain for me.

Previously I've used Pixen on OS X but it doesn't have the same awesome tileset creation mode as Pixothello.

Here's a list of art asset creation tools I just found in my wandering :-)

(maybe I should pin this post, and have another post about game design, and maybe a third about python libraries/tools?)

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Comments

killdream on 2011/03/23 01:58:

Heh, that thing looks cool indeed. Too bad it doesn't run on Linux.

mauve on 2011/03/23 08:29:

Annoying. I'm going to be using Inkscape again because I find the drawing tools give good results, but I do have to roll my own animation workflow. I can set up transparent clones as onion-skins while drawing but I need to export the frames and build the animation before I can view it.

richard on 2011/03/24 01:04:

I know your pain all too well, mauve. I think the Inkscape folk are working on it. Here's hoping something comes of SVG animation editing.

richard on 2011/03/24 01:16:

I just discovered this tool: Ajax Animator. Web-based animation editing. Not sure how useful it'd be for game development.

mauve on 2011/03/24 11:26:

Seems to have only very crude drawing tools, and then be object-based animation only, as there's no node editor.

I think Inkscape is very, very far from being an animation tool, because I don't think it's clear enough what people want from it. I want a frame-based editor whereas some people want SMIL-based whole-canvas animation.

If our Pyweek idea calls for enough animation, I might try cooking up an external tool that preconfigures an SVG document with guide layers and onion skins, opens Inkscape, and then displays the animation in a Pygame window, rebuilding it whenever it detects the file has been resaved.

Thinking in this vein an approach for creating an SVG animation editor might be to split Inkscape into UI components with Python bindings, to allow rapid prototyping of Inkscape-derived apps for animation, technical drawing, diagrams, network whiteboard, and so on. Not that I have the C++ skill or time to attempt anything like that.

Tee on 2011/03/25 00:36:

I've used Graphics Gale for my past entries with pixel art. It's good enough for me (it has layers and animation support, I don't need much more than that).

nitrofurano on 2011/03/25 23:18:

most people still say that GrafX2 sucks, but i love it (it's so close to the good old DeluxePaint! :) ) - and we can code our own Lua scripts there! - in my oppinion, GrafX2 is strongly reccomended, and it's defaultly available from the Ubuntu/Debian repositories! :)