#yanik

A few months ago Yanik released a neat little tool to aid artists working with PICO-8 (a fantasy console from Lexaloffle). PICO-8 already comes with a built-in sprite editor, so making art is pretty easy to begin with. What Sprite Show adds is previewing animations and basic character controls to test out your sprites in action as fast as possible. This is especially useful, for example, at game jams, so you can start cranking out animations even before your team implements animations in the game itself.

I have to admit the UI is a bit unintuitive to navigate, so make sure you first get used to it, before using it in a time-sensitive situation. 

Another usability issue is that even though Sprite Show was written with PICO-8, it is only available as a standalone app (and Windows only). The tool imports your sprite sheet from a PNG file that you had to previously export from your own copy of PICO-8 (where you actually drew the sprites). This means that any time you want to fix something, you have to go through the whole export-import process again. If Yanik offered a cartridge instead, I can imagine it’d be easier to quickly switch between drawing and previewing your animations.

Still, for the free (or pay what you want) price, Sprite Show might be useful for any of you PICO-8 artists out there. If that is so, you can get it from its itch.io page.

César Franck - Violin Sonata (Jazz version) ⎮ Yanik Fillion-Murphy