Pixelmash

I tried the demo for Pixelmash and was won over pretty quickly. It's not as all-encompassing as some tools out there, but it does a narrow set of things very well, which makes it feel extra intuitive and comfortable to use in a way few other tools do. The layer system is great, and being able to nest a layer in another layer and use the parent's pixels as a mask for the child layer is a great workflow, especially when paired with the non-destructive ability to stack effects. You can, for example, create a base color on the parent layer, draw some random pixels on the child layer, and then put a particle effect on the child layer to turn those random pixels into a moving animation that never strays from the bounds of the parent layer. You can add automatic outlines, create patterns and then save them out to use as custom dither patterns, and do all sorts of other interesting things. The Auto Shade effect is especially powerful for quickly adding some depth to an image. Auto Shade, Particles, and the Gradient effect all work together in really powerful ways for creating things like smoke, fireworks, and the like. If I had to criticize anything, I wish that it was easier to get a good loop with the particle system. It doesn't really loop, so if you want a seamless loop rather than a one-off effect like a firework, you'll have to make the motion quick enough that you don't notice the jump when it resets to the start of the animation. It's still very usable, but I've found that animations with slower movement that have to loop in a non-distracting way are best created in a different software. But Pixelmash can do things other software can't, like layers that are non-destructively downscaled to a target resolution while actually being higher resolution behind the scenes. These react differently to being moved around than layers that are at the downscaled pixel resolution, and you can mix and match layers or render a dynamic layer to the current downscaled resolution. There's a lot of flexibility here, and when you combine that with some really solid palette quantization features, it makes Pixelmash very powerful for converting pictures to sprite art. I'm also a big fan of the animation workflow that can do tweening super simply, as well as how good the software is at downscaling .svg files into pixel art that retains the underlying shape of the vector art. All in all, this is a deceptively powerful piece of software despite how easy it is to use. In my search for different software to use as a crutch for my fairly weak art skills, Pixelmash has been one of my favorite finds so far.