Everyone seems to be working on their own pixel art editors these days, specialized for one or another trick to optimize game asset production (or just because it’s fun :)). Dan Fessler’s been teasing new features of IndexPainter, a native implementation of his HD Index Painting scheme, ENDESGA has open-sourced the development of his minimal EDGITOR, and now the latest tool that came across my radar is Nevercenter’s Pixelmash.
The main feature that Nevercenter showed already back at the end of 2018 is non-destructive layer transforms, allowing for easy rigged animation. Plenty of features made it into Pixelmash since then, but the basic premise is that the software allows mixing of pixel and HD layers, the latter of which get subsequently pixelized. This allows for turning high-res shapes (of sub-pixel precision, relative to the end result) into much cleaner outlines when brought to low resolutions. Further, layer effects such as clean procedural outlines that get applied as the last step keep that feel of manual pixel crafting.
A time-limited demo is available on Pixelmash’s website to test the tool and if it seems useful to your projects, you can get a full license for $25 (macOS, Windows).
