Picking which tool I should use for pixel art

[darthdeus]

Over the past few months, I've been trying to learn some pixel art. During that time I've tried many different tools, but haven't found just the one I'd want to use for everything.

People always say try them all and see which one you like the most, but I'm not capable of that. I want to use the best tool for the job, and given I'm just starting out, I doubt that my choice will be the best one in the long run. Also I can't make myself happy using X, if the rest of the professional world is using Y, unless I have a good reason.

Here's my thoughts on the software I've bought & tried extensively (10-20 hours at least).

- Aseprite: works nicely for animations and drawing, but no support for tile maps
- Photoshop: even though I have quite a bit of experience with photoshop itself, doing pixel art in it feels kind of dirty ... animations are way more complicated than in Aseprite, and also no support for tile maps
- Pyxel Edit: tiles are very nice and intuitive, but everything else is quite a bit worse than the others (layers suck a lot compared to PS where you can get nice effects with blend modes nearly for free), animations are "different" ... not really sure if I dislike the way Pyxel Edit handles them, but Aseprite makes it easier once layers get involved imho
- Cosmigo Pro Motion NG: this feels like the tool I should be using, but at the same it also feels like stepping back 20 years in terms of UX ... there are tons of brushes and effects, but no layers on tile maps, and animations are also much clunkier than in Aseprite

I haven't looked at Graphics Gale, but from what I've read it's kinda like a more basic version of Pro Motion NG? It'd be great if someone could compare it to one of the others mentioned.

I know some people are using even Paint.NET, Piskel, or even MS Paint, but apart from intentionally constraining myself, I don't see any reason why I should use those over the mentioned ones?


Now onto questions:

- Is there some tool that I missed that can do both tilemaps and animations?
- What tool do you personally choose and why?
- Am I approaching the wrong way? On one hand I feel that the tool should do as much as possible, but at the same time pixel art is a lot about precision, and maybe having advanced shading tools like in Pro Motion can actually hurt me in terms of producing less quality art?
- Is it wise to do tilemaps in tools like Photoshop which don't have any support for them, and just manually copy them over all the time? I've seen a lot of people do it, but I've also seen people post ridiculous workflows when they copy things back and forth between tools all the time.


I know people probably ask this all the time, but at the same time I've been struggling to get decent answers to this over the past few months, asking on reddit, gamedev.net and other places. I realize that it comes down to personal preference to some extent, but there also has to be a component that can be evaluated objectively.

[ErekT]

In my opinion people who say try them all are right, because it really *is* down to personal preference more than anything else.

- Is there some tool that I missed that can do both tilemaps and animations?

Not that I know of. ProMotion seems like the best bet for this.

- What tool do you personally choose and why?

GraphicsGale and Gimp. I do a lot of animating and GraphicsGale is good with that. Selection tools are kinda shaky tho so I'll copy stuff back and forth between GG and Gimp sometimes when I need to.

- Am I approaching the wrong way? On one hand I feel that the tool should do as much as possible, but at the same time pixel art is a lot about precision, and maybe having advanced shading tools like in Pro Motion can actually hurt me in terms of producing less quality art?

3D is a very technical discipline so the tools matter a lot there. Vector stuff and 2D illustration less so. With pixel art the tools hardly matter at all as long as you're comfortable with them. I mean, you place a pixel and there it is! To get that pixel to work well with all the other pixels you place is entirely up to you.

- Is it wise to do tilemaps in tools like Photoshop which don't have any support for them, and just manually copy them over all the time? I've seen a lot of people do it, but I've also seen people post ridiculous workflows when they copy things back and forth between tools all the time.

ProMotion has specialized tilemap tools if I remember right. Other than that I don't know, I don't really do tilemaps myself.

Why not pick a program that looks promising and then, if or when you hit some kind of wall then try another and see if that works better for you? To me, it seems more intuitive to experiment and figure out the optimal workflow for yourself rather than try and nail it down beforehand. Everybody different and all that. Even in the 3D world where tools really do matter, people will swear by different things.

[Ai]

Grafx2 can do both tilemaps and animations (animated tilemaps are a different matter..), and should be on your list regardless.
It can do layers, but not simultaneously with animations

[Kasumi]

I believe I have actually tried most things out there. I settled on Aseprite. Aseprite, to me, is straight better than everything out there, and has a faster development cycle than anything else out there. The only thing other programs have that it doesn't that I'd find myself using are tilemaps. (Pixel art wise. If it got anti-aliased brushes and opacity linked to tablet pressure, I'd use it over a lot of painting software too.)

I found Aseprite to be better than everything when it was free in 2014, and since then it has gotten features faster than all of its primary competition. In short, I feel it's going to eventually get the things it doesn't have, and the pace of its development will leave whatever other programs used to have them exclusively behind.

It very soundly beats the hell out of anything near its price point. Pro Motion may beat it features-wise, but like you, I find using it to be completely contrary to most modern programs.

It doesn't yet compete with beasts like Photoshop or TVPaint, but I genuinely can't imagine using anything else for non tiled pixel art. When I do want tilemaps, I import whatever from Aseprite into Pyxel Edit. Pyxel Edit has better design principles than Pro Motion for tilemaps to me, but it frustratingly can't even do a block copy.

Wouldn't it be great if you could just... get all those tiles in one step? Wouldn't it be great? Wouldn't it be great?! 
(This has potentially been fixed by an update by now, but I kind of doubt it? It's the opposite of Aseprite as far as development speed.)

You can totally do that in Pro Motion, but other things about how it handles tiles still make me prefer Pyxel Edit.

To add to your list of programs to try:
JPixel: https://emad.itch.io/jpixel (I haven't given this one the time it deserves, because it doesn't work on my main computer. If anyone tries it and finds it awesome, please, please report back)
D-Pixel: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=14983.340

D-Pixel has almost better tile stuff than Pyxel Edit (especially me, who does NES things), but it's missing some key things.

Pyxel Edit is the thing I've liked the most for tilemaps from what I know exists, but I only recommend it because I don't know of anything better rather than thinking it's really good.

I think Aseprite is really good, but it doesn't do tilemaps. (You can read another "review" I've written about Aseprite at the bottom of this post on another forum if you click the "Aseprite Love Letter" spoiler.)

For what it's worth, I generally prefer using separate programs that are strong in unique areas, rather than any all in one tool. Even if that weren't true, I would give up the dream of trying to find some program no one has heard of that's
1. Good
with
2. Tilemaps
and
3. Supports Animation.

It's hard enough just to find a program that's good with tilemaps OR animation. If you do have access to Photoshop, you can use smart objects for tilemaps. But I don't use photoshop, so can't give specifics about what that workflow is like.

[yrizoud]

Darthdeus you've already done the hard work of really TRYING different programs, and getting a good idea of
1) which one is strong / suitable in the different situations,
2) which ones have the ergonomics that you prefer (ex: Right-click = colorpick, or paint with background color ? Mouse wheel zooms or does something else ? Are keyboard shortcuts intuitive or user-configurable?).

IMO you can't expect to be able to always use the same program for everything.
When I coded on Grafx2, every time we considered big evolutions (layers, animation, tile maps), there was a wide range of choices. Do we try to handle many different needs, or specialize for a subset (and then become very handy in these cases) ? In the end we settled for a middle ground : These things are only implemented up to a point where they don't conflict with the usability of the rest of the program as a single 256-color-image editor.

Animation and tiles are complete subjects which deserve a very specialized program as soon as you need something ambitious. Tiles used in multiple maps ? Cross-fade in an animation, or animation involving several moving (scripted) elements ? A program which allows them is going to be very complicated to use. Anytime you need something simpler, a simpler program is going to be more suitable.
 

[eishiya]

Seconding yrizoud.
I think rather than focusing on doing everything, programs should instead make it easy to switch to other programs, perhaps going as far as having an "Open in (thing)" option, to save you the time of launching the program and then browsing for the file (could auto-detect other installed image editors based on a hard-coded list, or perhaps users can edit a config file with names and paths). Being able to switch to another program easily and continue working on the same file helps avoid that big creative interruption of export>open>import, which is probably the main reason so many people want programs that do it all.

The other reason people like to stick to one program is so that they can have a single UI to master. But, as programs get more complex, so does the UI, and many features inevitably are clunky because they don't work with the core verbs of the program. If they try to adjust the core UI to make those things easier, everything else gets harder or more complicated to reason about and use.

I say all of this as someone who wants to use a single program for everything so much, I use Photoshop to do tiles and animation (and non-pixel art, of course).

[Ai]

Seconding yrizoud.
I think rather than focusing on doing everything, programs should instead make it easy to switch to other programs, perhaps going as far as having an "Open in (thing)" option, to save you the time of launching the program and then browsing for the file (could auto-detect other installed image editors based on a hard-coded list,

Some programs do do this, and it's good for specialized cases (like 'edit just this layer in X'), but I think the general case probably should be supported by the WM/OS.
Basically two shortcuts / actions : "open current document with default for this application" and "Open current document with..", and the application just having to implement a callback that returns what the current document is. Seems much more practical than expecting each app to reimplement the basically same functionality.

I might be able to hack something like that together using DBUS, a bit of Python and some shell scripting. (can't comment on what it would take on Windows)

It would be nice if attempting to re-open an already open document instead reloaded it in target app.. I guess in terms of required coding, that would be similar.

[yrizoud]

Indeed, a lot depends on what facilities the OS provides. Clipboard is sometimes fitting : Copy in one program, paste in the other. But (on Windows at least) 256-color images are not a default format.

[Piotr]

I found MS Paint the best. I recommend to download the XP version if you want a good starting palette. Don't listen to such things as Paint.net, they don't even have an option to clear the image with your background color or allow to erase non-transparently. Therefore I recommend MS Paint in XP. If you use a 16-bit Windows system instead of 32-bit or 64-bit, you can use 95 version, albeit with slightly different ellipses. Grafx2 restricts itself to 256 colors and doesn't allow even-sized ellipse.