Quickest way to create and edit sprite sheets

[HammyHavoc]

Hey all,

I've been hacking away at Mystery of Solarus DX's source for a while to understand the ins and outs of how the engine functions, adding my own features, and eventually arrived at a crude one dungeon prototype of a cyberpunk aesthetic ARPG. It's pretty cool, I'm pleased with it, but working with sprite sheets is something that I find to be a little tedious.

Is there any specific program for editing sprite sheets that people always gravitate towards or recommend? I have Photoshop and Illustrator, and whilst they're very powerful, they also feel like they have slightly the wrong UX for what I'm doing with what's borderline animation with frame-to-frame differences.

Thanks for your responses in advance.

All the best,
Hammy

[yankscally]

paint.net, a trick I've picked up after trial and error is using the photoshop layering system with the sheets. When making a sheet its very tedious to get the sprites in the right place, but if you copy in one layer and change the opacity of the original you get some cue points where to place them, and when you are finished you can delete the first layer so you only have your sprites left.

[Diarandor]

Try Aseprite. It might be the best program for this type of pixel art. Many professional artists (and non-professional artists like me) use it.

Here there is a ranking from the Slant community with votes for the best pixel-art/sprite editors in this year 2017:
https://www.slant.co/topics/1547/~pixel-art-sprite-editors
(In that list, Aseprite is ranked 1st and paint.net is ranked 10th.)

[Zefk]

Try Aseprite. It might be the best program for this type of pixel art. Many professional artists (and non-professional artists like me) use it.

Here there is a ranking from the Slant community with votes for the best pixel-art/sprite editors in this year 2017:
https://www.slant.co/topics/1547/~pixel-art-sprite-editors
(In that list, Aseprite is ranked 1st and paint.net is ranked 10th.)

That is a nice list. I use Gimp mostly and Krita (has a nice overlay link ability). krita is really going crazy these days with new features. Krita is free, has a nice animation editor, and Photoshop like layers. I normally use it when modding opensource pixel art. The layer link overlay feature is really useful for texturing. I use gimp for most pixel art from scratch and for its useful extensions. For example, multiple export extensions, multi-layer-cut-copy-paste, layer effects, cartoon effects, and all the free extensions online. Krita lacks extensions and that is why I use gimp more.

I am not so sure about quick, but really nice sprites can be made with time. Most time for me is spent on the walking design because all other animations for the sprite get based off that. I copy, paste, and edit my walking animations more than anything.

[Constantkaos]

ive been using gimp too my knight is coming along well i think

[oclero]

I seriously recommand Aseprite, this is the best sprite software I've used. It is 100% dedicated to sprite creation, so it handles animation, frames, layers, export with lines/columns, the pen tools are better than standard pen like in Gimp or Photoshop because they have a pixel-art option to draw pixel-art lines, with no adjacent pixels, etc.
It's just the best, by far. Try it, you'll see. It's harder to come back to another software.