Show HN: I made a pixel art editor for Windows desktop | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I made a pixel art editor for Windows desktop

lightcube.art

161 pointsisometric_845 comments

I make game developer tools for fun and to fill a need that I myself might encounter when trying to make a game. I figured creating a pixel art editor would be a good challenge (graphics programming is hard), I wanted it to be fast and as easy to use as possible, something that Photoshop users could comfortably use as a replacement. A 99% fully functional free demo is available for download (you just can't save the layered art files to disk using the demo version).

My biggest question is "why would I buy this and not Aseprite?". Aseprite is very well established in this space and this new tool doesn't seem like it has anythign unique to offer. Not that building a new tool isn't a good project, but when you're selling it you probably need some distinctive features, certainly if you want to win over existing users.

Aseprite is a very good product! For me personally I don't like the interface but that's just personal taste and maybe there are others out there who might prefer something like what I've created, I would hope so. Lightcube imports PSD which last I checked Aseprite doesn't do(?), text editing is inline as opposed to a text field in a window and the shape tool includes isometric ellipse which is pain in the butt to draw. Bottom line is 80% of any pixel art editor is the same functionality as any other editor, but once you've established that you can start to add on the innovative ideas and start to differentiate. Well, that's the plan anyhow. Either way, competition is a good thing!

Additionally, Aseprite runs on Linux, which is a big pro for me.

The Aseprite homepage mentions Windows, Ubuntu/Linux, and macOS for their trial: https://www.aseprite.org/trial/

I assume that Aseprite runs on all these platforms.

Aseprite is also open-source and free if you compile it yourself. https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite

Aseprite is source-available now, not open source [1]. Libresprite [2] is a fork of a past GPLv2 version of Aseprite.

[1] https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/blob/main/EULA.txt

[2] https://github.com/LibreSprite/LibreSprite

Aseprite files also can be ingested directly by tools down the line. Godot, for instance, with a plugin can setup all your animations directly from an aseprite file.

I think both Aseprite and Graphics Gale are great tools for pixel art. If you have Aseprite on Steam, you can try the experimental branches to try features before they are fully fledged. I've been using the tile branch and playing with it for some time now.

You can also compile for yourself if you want - even though I have bought it on Steam I have my own build too that I use in an old Linux computer when I want to draw in non-distracted almost offline way.

> My biggest question is "why would I buy this and not Aseprite?"

"why would I buy this and when paint.net is free?"

$15 seems like a big ask when equivalent or greater functionality can be had at no cost.

I think creating something for fun is good by itself, also the app looks good. Personally I wouldn't use since I use Linux and prefer OSS, but the app looks really cool, congrats

Thank you! that's encouraging

I am saying this in a very good way: I was 10 years old(give or take) when I started fiddling about with Macromedia(later acquired by Adobe) Flash 4 and the screenshots gave me so many flashbacks, like making dumb animations, fiddling with scenes and the strange animal that was action script. The UI looks soooooooooo familiar..

I'll take that as a compliment, and if I've achieved nothing else, glad to give you flashbacks.

No, you've achieved much more and I'd be curious to give it a spin some day when I finally find the motivation and time and work on some games. Sadly I'm swarmed with much larger stuff atm, even in my spare time :(

If you want to distinguish yourself against your competition, you should look into implementing Index Painting or realtime palette conversion as a built-in feature:

https://lospec.com/pixel-art-tutorials/hd-index-painting-in-...

You've got a really good start though, the UI looks clean and you've got a good feature set as-is.

Realtime palette conversion would let people author pixel art using truecolor tools while staring at the palettized result, which is a fun way to work.

Thanks for the suggestion! Going to implement this.

I would also love to see such a feature! Please do!

+1 for the index painting!!!

Amazing! I dabble in isometric pixel art, and I use MS Paint - which puts art on "Hard Mode" for me.

I love the idea of an "isometric grid!"

I will buy this software once I figure out how to use Steam.

Thank you for the encouraging comment!

The interface looks very clean. Would you mind sharing a bit about the tech behind it, assuming it isn't a proprietary secret? At first glance it looks like a C# .NET application.

It's all MFC C++ where most of the UI controls are custom ones that I created to achieve the kind of interaction I was looking for. I used LodePng and gifanimcplusplus for processing png and gif files, the rest of the code is all in-house. I learned a lot in terms of processing RGBA as fast as possible.

To be a bit more verbose: Most of the work is just processing RGBA data in terms of adding or removing pixels, or mixing it, and then pushing that to the display. So it's really just a straight up C++ app with some UI code.

I'm not versed in pixel art, so my naive question is, isn't it easier to draw using vector graphics and then convert to pixel art when needed? Because I think it is not easy to manipulate pixels, but vector objects are much easier to manipulate. Also, vector graphics retain the high resolution, so it's much easier to create for many different resolutions. Even if the automatic conversion to pixels wasn't perfect, wouldn't polishing them after conversion be a lot less work?

I'm not in game development, and I'm a pretty mediocre-at-best artist, but I personally have found it considerably easier to draw pixel art simply because you limit yourself to like a 16x16 grid for a sprite. There's a lot less room to screw stuff up, and you get a lot of implied detail while also being pretty easy to be very precise.

If you took a vector drawing and rasterized it to 16x16, I think that might kind of look like crap, because it'd be hard to know ahead of time how the rasterizing will work. How will it handle diagonal lines? How will it figure out which pixels to shade and which ones not to? I'm not saying you couldn't make a vector renderer that handles these things in a way that you'd like, but I am saying that you'd most likely not be terribly happy with the default results.

Pixel art relies on specific pixels being colored or defined in ways that a vectorized representation would never render to. In other words, it often looks bad, especially at lower resolutions (which is the whole esthetic of pixel art). This article has some good examples of vector icons not holding up well compared to their "hand crafted" pixel counterparts https://www.pushing-pixels.org/2011/11/04/about-those-vector...

From personal experience, rasterizing vector art for a pixel art aesthetic usually leaves a lot to be desired, especially when you look at angled lines and curved shapes. That being said, there are rasterizing projects with a focus on pixel art, for instance Superpixelator: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2486042.2486044

If the art is low-res enough that the "pixelness" is noticeable, you're throwing away so much detail from the vector drawing there's no point in making vector drawings in the first place. Complex or highly animated pixel art might involve a non-pixel sketch beforehand, but there's no point in cleaning that up into vectors just to re-draw it a third time as pixel art. (And if you just shrink down high-res art into pixels, it looks really bad.)

Some higher-res or smoothly animated styles do use 2D or 3D renderings that get cleaned up into pixel sprites; if you're old enough to remember the Donkey Kong Country games for the SNES, that's one example. I think 2017's Sonic Mania also used 3D assets in its pixel art pipeline. But most professional-quality pixel art isn't built from higher-res art because there's usually no benefit, especially if it's a low-res "retro" style.

In addition to what everyone else has said, pixel art relies a lot of techniques like AA, dithering, outlines, specific ways of drawing curves, limited palettes, and implied detail that make it difficult to just convert from a vector piece. Two examples where conversions were used are Final Fantasy Tactics and the Advance War series, but as others have stated, you do have to go in and clean up the lines. There's also a nice feeling that's present in hand pixeled art that's hard to achieve from just conversion.

Converting vector graphics to actually good-looking pixel art requires a lot of manual work (and talent and experience). You would do that work in an editor like this one.

> so it's much easier to create for many different resolutions. Even if the automatic conversion to pixels wasn't perfect, wouldn't polishing them after conversion be a lot less work?

Different resolution demand different solutions. For example, if an artist uses a very low resolution such as 16x16 pixels for a character sprite, he will often favour an excessively large head because only then will he have enough pixels for his facial expressions. Likewise it does not make sense to use too many different colours in such a resolution. In contrast, if the arist wants to use more "realistic" sprites, she or he would probably choose a higher resolution with a larger colour palette from the start. So basically one is designing for a specific pixel-resolution and instead of adjusting the pixel-resolution to a screen-resolution one just scales the pixels themselves into little boxes when showing them on higher screen-resolutions.

Does it support a practical stylus-oriented workflow? Can I use all its functions in a purely touch+stylus mode, without reaching for the keyboard at all? I'm looking for such a pixel-art tool, not aware of any at the moment. (Also, I'm totally an absolute amateur, so I might be missing some.)

Yes it does support non-keyboard usage through the stylus and touch, I tested on a Wacom tablet and a Surface Pro during development - I recommend downloading the demo first to be sure that it fits your requirements.

I am greatly reminded of iDraw from my RPG Maker days, fun times.

I'll make a note to check this out. Also kudos for supporting Windows 7, even if one of your distribution channels no longer does.

Looks fantastic, well done!

Potentially sacrilegious question, given this is very clearly made for Windows: Do you plan on eventually supporting macos? :D

I wanted to, I really did. I tried replacing the UI with an OpenGL UI of my own but I could never get smooth enough mouse drawing so I put that aside. Sorry macOS users :-(

On mobile chrome samsung s21 ultra your cookie footer/modal is below the fold.

Thank you for letting me know

A bit off-topic, but the website has large white space on the right side on mobile.

Thanks for letting me know!

How did you implement search on the website?

I built the site in markdown and used Material for MkDocs to generate the site as static pages. Material for MkDocs automatically adds this really neat JavaScript powered search feature to the site https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/setup/setting-up...

What are the advantages over aseprite?

- Import Photoshop PSD files

- Isometric shape tool

- Built-in pattern brushes (for things like brickwork, landscapes, fences, windows, doors, meshes etc., stuff thats painstaking to draw)

- Color ramp generator with configurable hue shifting

- Inline text tool

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