Description
Making a few sprites for your own game in Photoshop fights you at every step: you zoom to several hundred percent to see a single pixel, the brush keeps anti-aliasing your edges, and frame-by-frame animation means building a timeline by hand. Dedicated pixel art tools exist, but the popular ones cost money.
Pixelorama is the free, open-source one, built on the Godot engine. Brushes are hard-edged and pixel-aligned by default, so what you draw stays crisp, and the pixel-specific tools — palettes, tilemaps, symmetry, outline and stroke effects — are all present. Animation is built in too: onion skinning, frame tags, drawing while playback runs, and export to spritesheet, GIF or video. It reads Aseprite, Photoshop and Krita files. Windows, Linux, macOS and the browser. MIT licensed, 10k stars.
Pixel-accurate tools: Hard brushes, pixel-perfect mode, symmetry drawing and selection transforms, with fully customisable palettes.
Frame-by-frame animation: Onion skinning, frame tags and a multi-layer timeline, with drawing allowed while the animation plays.
Tilemap layers: A dedicated tilemap mode where editing one tile updates the whole map, which speeds up 2D level art.
Export formats: PNG sequences, spritesheets, GIF, APNG and video, covering both game engines and social posting.
Imports other tools: Opens Aseprite, Photoshop and Krita files so an existing project can move across without redrawing.
Cross-platform plus web: Native builds for Windows, Linux and macOS alongside a browser version for working on someone else machine.
Pixelorama is the free, open-source one, built on the Godot engine. Brushes are hard-edged and pixel-aligned by default, so what you draw stays crisp, and the pixel-specific tools — palettes, tilemaps, symmetry, outline and stroke effects — are all present. Animation is built in too: onion skinning, frame tags, drawing while playback runs, and export to spritesheet, GIF or video. It reads Aseprite, Photoshop and Krita files. Windows, Linux, macOS and the browser. MIT licensed, 10k stars.
Features
Pixel-accurate tools: Hard brushes, pixel-perfect mode, symmetry drawing and selection transforms, with fully customisable palettes.
Frame-by-frame animation: Onion skinning, frame tags and a multi-layer timeline, with drawing allowed while the animation plays.
Tilemap layers: A dedicated tilemap mode where editing one tile updates the whole map, which speeds up 2D level art.
Export formats: PNG sequences, spritesheets, GIF, APNG and video, covering both game engines and social posting.
Imports other tools: Opens Aseprite, Photoshop and Krita files so an existing project can move across without redrawing.
Cross-platform plus web: Native builds for Windows, Linux and macOS alongside a browser version for working on someone else machine.
