Pixel FX Designer

[h1] Pixel FX Designer is a powerful, light-weight tool for sprite-sheet creation of effects [/h1] What drew me into Pixel FX Designer is the length of time it takes to hand-craft sprites and animations (especially those that need to loop) of certain effects. From fire, to water, to galaxy effects, to explosions, this tool works exceptionally well for sprite-sheet creation specifically. However, this tool is not a substitute or replacement for hand-crafted sprites. While this tool can practically do anything, it is limited to what it can export the project as, and the limited canvas sizes can prevent the creation of large-scale effects that look nice (without being clipped by the borders). I've already spent a considerable amount of time on this application, making roughly 35 different effects for Looping GIF animations. There's a lot of depth to this tool, and should you find yourself needing to work quickly on making effects such as detached special attacks and the like, you can most certainly do that with this tool. [h2]Is it worth the asking price of $20.00 ($19.99) USD?[/h2] Absolutely. Whether you are a Novice, Intermediate, or Advanced artist and sprite creator, this tool is most certainly worth looking into if you require such software. I highly recommend picking up [i]Aseprite[/i] as well, as that will let you further modify the exported GIF animation, as well as syncing the animation with any attack movement. [h2]What does it mean for Hand-crafted Sprites?[/h2] Those will always stick around, because there is a lot more control to be had when animating. This tool, from my short 20 hour experience, is more for the creation of effects that do not directly involve a character's movements. Melee attack animations themselves are not possible, but the slash effect itself is. [h2]Features[/h2] [list] [*] Exports to GIF, PNG sequence (series of PNGs), a PNG sheet of all frames rendered, and JSON. [*] Colour palette option to maintain aesthetic consistency. [*] Various movement options that impact the particles and/or the emitter(s). [*] Options to adjust spawning behaviors of particles. [*] Options to adjust particle size during and prior to spawn. [*] Saves as a .PPD system file. [/list]