Software

Aseprite is a pixel art editor built around sprite work: an indexed-color workflow, onion skinning and a timeline for animation, tilemap layers, custom brushes, and export straight to sprite sheets. Extensions and Lua scripts add anything it lacks. It is the editor most Lospec artists reach for first.

picoCAD 2 lets you make small low-poly models out of a handful of shapes and texture them with a single 128x128 texture sheet in a deliberately constrained toolset. Textures can be painted live in the program using a basic pixel art editor.

It also allows you to create simple animations and can be used to make larger and more complex models than the original picoCAD.

You can export renders, models and sprite sheets directly from it.

picoCAD builds small low-poly models out of a handful of shapes and textures them with a single tiny texture sheet, in a deliberately constrained toolset. Models and turntable renders export straight out of it.

lvllvl is a browser editor for character-based art. It covers PETSCII and a long list of other machines' character sets, with layers, animation frames, custom tilesets and palettes, and it can generate frames from an uploaded image or video. Projects save to the browser, to GitHub or to Google Drive.

A general purpose image editor that can be set up for pixel art: nearest neighbour scaling, pencil tool, indexed color mode. Animation is awkward, but the flexibility lets you mimic advanced tools such as index painting.

Blender is the free 3D suite, and it turns up constantly in low-spec work: modelling and texturing low-poly assets, rendering 3D scenes down to a pixel-art sprite sheet, and building the turnarounds that hand-pixelled animation is traced from. Its add-on ecosystem covers most of the rest.

Blockbench is a free and open source editor for low-poly models with pixel art textures. Models can be exported into standard 3D formats, to be shared, rendered, 3D-printed, or used in game engines or games line Minecraft. Modeling, UV mapping, texturing with pixel-art tools, rigging and animating, can all be done in the program.

Blockbench has a clean and beginner friendly interface, but also offers lots of customization and advanced features for experienced 3D artists. Plugins can extend the functionality of the program even further.

PixelForge is a font editor built for pixel fonts: draw each glyph on a grid, set the spacing and kerning, and export a TrueType file that installs like any other font. It can also import an existing TTF - if it is genuinely a pixel font it detects the size and loads the glyphs back onto the grid for editing.

Piskel is an open source editor that runs in the browser, with layers, animation and a public gallery. Development has stopped, but it still works and is a common first editor.

Pixel Composer builds effects, animations and generated art from node graphs, so a change to one input flows through the whole result.

PICO-8 bundles a code editor, sprite editor, map editor, sound effect editor and tracker into one tiny virtual machine with strict limits that keep games small and finishable.

BitFontMaker2 is a bitmap font editor that runs in a browser: draw each character on a small grid, set the widths, and download a TrueType file. It has been around a long time and stayed simple, which is why it is still the quickest way to get a pixel font out of an idea.

Godot has a dedicated 2D renderer with pixel-snapping, nearest neighbour filtering and viewport scaling options that make low-resolution games straightforward.

GrafX2 was made for DOS and has been ported everywhere since. It has tools no other program does, constraints for retro platforms, and an antiquated interface.

Moebius is an ANSI art editor from the Blocktronics scene, with collaborative editing, character palettes and 16-color and iCE color modes.

Novaboard runs in the browser and as a desktop app, with layers, animation and effects.

Picotron is a fantasy workstation from the makers of PICO-8: a small imaginary computer with its own desktop, file system and built-in tools - a sprite editor, a map editor, a tracker and a code editor - all inside fixed limits. It is roomier than PICO-8 and keeps the same deliberately constrained feel.

Pixquare is a pixel art editor for iPad and iPhone with a deliberately dense feature set: layers, animation, palettes, tiled preview and pressure-aware Apple Pencil drawing. It reads and writes the formats desktop editors use, so a drawing started on a tablet finishes anywhere.

Pixelorama is a full featured free editor: layers, animation with onion skinning, tile mode, palettes, and an active development pace. It runs on every desktop platform and in the browser.

Petscii Cola is a free, basic PETSCII editor which can save raster images and Commodore 64-playable files, as well as convert raster images to PETSCII, multicolor or hires Commodore 64 images.

It also includes a choice of Commodore 64 palettes, and a gallery of PETSCII art.