JPixel

Pixel art games seem to be gaining a lot of ground and popularity. There are plenty of reasons for which we like games with a retro look; they’re cute, colorful, they also run on slower machines but mostly because they look cute.

The increasing interest in pixel art games triggers demand for them, and as a consequence more developers take on the opportunity to start creating. For the novice game designer, JPixel was built. It’s a lightweight piece of development kit that’s designed to help you create pixel art animations and tilesets.

JPixel comes with a simple and intuitive GUI that should appeal to both novice and advanced designers. Its main window borrows the layout of popular image editors and design tools so everything should feel right at home once you run it.

It provides all the standard tools: pencil, bucket, selection, tile, eyedropper, wand, erase, all of which are easily accessible from a side panel. If you’ve used editing tools before, working with JPixel should be a cinch, especially when it comes to the basics.

JPixel has its limitations but until you stumble into them, you’ll enjoy having a simple means of creating GIFs and building tilesets for games. The latter can be exported as .png images which guarantees that quality sticks.

Moreover, the app offers tile swapping and even lends a hand when it comes to applying filters. It supplies HUE shift, brightness, contrast, solarize, invert and you can even convert to palette colors.

To end, JPixel is a very handy tool if you’re just starting off with pixel art animation. Truth be told, a tutorial for it would have been a blessing but since it’s good for just the basics, you’ll quickly find help online.