3 Free Programs for Game Artists

The majority of Crea graphics are made in Adobe Photoshop CS5, but I’ve also been collecting little specialty programs to help with specific tasks. These programs are all available for free! Sometimes the internet is a wonderful place, right? Let me introduce you to them:

1. Spriter

Spriter is an animation tool designed for 2D video games. We’ve been using this to create the character animations for Crea. Spriter makes it possible to easily swap out images in an animation, such as changing the hair style of characters, or the clothing color, or even their entire equipment set. Thanks to Spriter, all of the assets and animations only have to be made once – not dozens of frames for every single piece of armor. We plan to use Spriter for our characters, bosses and other animation-intensive creatures.

Earlier this year, the team behind Spriter ran a Kickstarter campaign to fund their project. Right now Spriter is still in an alpha state – which means that there are lots of bugs and not everything works smoothly. Additionally, it’s not really designed for teeny-tiny pixel art, and sometimes I feel like I have to wrestle with it a bit. Still, it’s been helpful to us and we eagerly look forward to each new update the Spriter team pushes out.

2. Pyxel Edit.

Pyxel Edit is a clean little program that makes it easy to create seamlessly patterned tiles and tile variations. The instructions are a little vague, but once you get the hang of it, it’s really pretty simple. We’re mainly using this for ground tiles. Pyxel Edit seems to have a little bit of trouble working with my Wacom tablet, but other than that it’s pretty much a godsend.

3. Sprite Sheet Packer. 

Sprite Sheet Packer has one purpose, and it does it well: it takes all the individual frames for a sprite, arranges them into a tidy little sprite sheet, and creates an accompanying text file that “maps the image file names with their rectangles, for use in your program to find the regions of the image you are interested in,” as they put it. We only just started using this program, but it’s definitely been a time-saver for us.

So there you have it – a little peek into the tools that we use to create the visuals for Crea. I hope these programs come in handy for your future modding needs.