Pixen
Pixen is a professional pixel art editor designed for working with low-resolution raster art, such as those 8-bit sprites found in old-school video games. Pixen packs all the tools pixel artists need in an intuitive, native interface including support for high zoom levels, animation editing, color palettes, and a lot more.
Leverage Pixen's wide array of tools when composing pixel art: Pencil, Eraser, Brightness, Text, Eyedropper, Zoom, Rectangular Selection, Magic Wand, Lasso, Move, Fill, Line, Rectangle, and Ellipse.
Take advantage of the flexibility layers provide when working with complex pixel art. Change opacity, blending modes, and more to compose creative effects.
Use filters to adjust colors, create effects, and post-process your artwork.
With Pixen, you can add and organize commonly-used colors into palettes. Pixen can even import and export color palettes in the Adobe Color Table, Microsoft Palette, JASC Palette, and GIMP Palette formats.
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Piskel
Check a preview of your animation in real time as you draw. Adjust the frame delay on the fly. Several export modes supported. Animated GIFs for sharing, spritesheet PNG/ZIP for bigger projects etc. All the code is open-source and available on GitHub.
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Inktica
Inktica is a pixel-art and texture editor for creating low-resolution artwork, animated sprites, and game assets on mobile devices. Its drawing tools include a brush with pixel-perfect line mode, eraser, fill, gradient, line, shape, and color-picking tools, plus selection controls for copying, moving, rotating, and flipping artwork. Layers help organize projects, while frame-by-frame animation and onion skinning support sprite workflows. Users can work with classic-console palettes, import palettes from Lospec, and open a reference image while drawing. Inktica can import Aseprite project files and export finished work to image, animation, video, and sprite-sheet formats for saving or sharing. It is intended for pixel artists and game creators producing retro-style graphics, sprites, and textures.
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Aseprite
Aseprite lets you create 2D animations for video games. From sprites, to pixel-art, retro style graphics, and whatever you like about the 8-bit and 16-bit era. It has a color mode, which tell you how many colors the image can handle. All images in the sprite are in one specific mode, you cannot mix RGB images with Indexed images in the same sprite. It contains a set of layers. You can see them in the Timeline. The most important concept here is that there are two kind of layers: the background layer for opaque sprites, and transparent layers. A sprite can contain only one background layer, but several transparent layers. It contains animation frames. Each frame has a duration, i.e. how many milliseconds the frame must be on screen when the animation is being played. Integrate Aseprite in your assets pipeline with the command-line interface (CLI). Store several animations in one texture atlas.
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