SpriteMate - Pixel Art Editor - Commerical Project

[Brightwise]

Hello guys,

hope you don't mind me signing up to anounce my just-released commercial project SpriteMate, since it is so greatly related to the topics of this forum.

http://www.brightwise.de/spritemate/

It's basically a 2D-pixel editor specifically created for low-res animated retro-style pixel-art.
As you can clearly see from those animations, I'm not an artist, not even a graphics guy, just the SW-architect/designer/programmer of this with some passion for those old computer games I grew up on.

I always wanted to release a software project commercially and put a significant amount of time in this (side-project over ~3 years). Since recently, SpriteMate is available for free download for evaluation and can be bought/registered worldwide except for the US. SpriteMate comes freely as nag-ware, which means that it's full-featured , but you are regularly disturbed in your work process unless you register for €5.

Of course, the software is still under maintenance and I am open to development of further features or other changes where meaningful. I greatly appreciate your feedback on my program in this thread. What are the sticky points for real artists working with this? Any comment is appreciated. Would love to see animation/drawing projects based on SpriteMate. Maybe you want to give it a try on your Windows Computer with the .NET framework installed.

Cheers
Marc

[surt]

You could do a better job selling your visual art tool with a visual. Not one screenshot to be found.

[surt]

Now you've got some screen shots:
Pure magenta is just about the worst possible choice for a background colour. Hard on the eyes and colour polluting (colour perception being relative). There's good reason that low-contrast grey checks are the de facto default. I do hope it is at least configurable to something else.

Given that you are selling it, what does it do that's better, or at least different, from existing tools? The listed features are seem pretty standard (though not sure what "flood shade" means). Why, for example, would I choose to buy this over using GraphicsGale for free?

The max image size recommendation seems arbitrarily limiting and doesn't inspire confidence.

Wine doesn't seem to like it, so I haven't been able to try it (couldn't be arsed booting into windows), so I can't comment further.

[Brightwise]

Hello surt,

thanks for your input. When I had my first surveys a few years ago, I guess GraphicsGale was still comercial in the full-featured version. I wasn't aware of this, although I always had an eye on piskel. I agree, it seems odd to sell it then, since GG is probably superior in the majority of aspects.

Anyway, things develop over time, so once you started out you might just end up with something showable. You can buy it with a single click, it auto-generates a serial key and invoice automatically on the servers. I always just wanted to do that. - Release early - is a paradigm I try to follow, always being short on time. If you have a solid program, you don't look too much for your competitiors. For sure, it will do things differently, at least when you focus one the fine details. Maybe we can find an audience who appreciates these differences. Flood shade is just flood fill on a single axis with just the inner borderline of the area being drawn. As far as I know, it is a unique feature.

Mac/Linux is unsupported due to lack of time. I never had this on the map. You could try to run it with mono. It is a .NET executable. I got that feedback twice now, maybe I'll have a look on it in the future.

Good hint on Magenta. I thought I had read something about contrasts in color theory and came to the conclusion that Magenta was be the optimal choice. Having it configurable is already is on the list of tbd features, but didn't make it into the initial release.