I am into game design and I want to make my game in pixel art style. I saw a program called Graphics Gale. Is it good for pixel art?
Can anyone recommend some open-source, or free, Windows 10 pixel art software?
Additionally I'm looking for software that can also help me with the animation.
What you are looking for is MagicaVoxel
It's an 8-bit voxel modeling and animating program that's free and open-source.
The software is still in its infancy but there are a small amount of tutorials showing how to create scenes and animate them.
There's also a large list of other free programs here.
Notable other options are Aseprite which is free if you compile it yourself and GraphicsGale which is also free.
Aseprite's compiling instructions are included in the install and can be reviewed on it's github page.
I really like Aseprite. It is not free though (unless you compile it yourself). It costs about $15.
For at free alternative you could try Piskel, which runs in the browser. Also a good program, but a little annoying that you need to export and import files instead of just saving and loading.
I recently discovered Piskel, which is free and Open Source. You can make animations in it, and it has a web client if you want to access it from anywhere.
Stardew Valley developer concernedApe has said that he drew that game's pixel art in Paint.net. It works on Win10 and is free to use too (you can pay extra for getting it on the windows store, but you don't have to).
It doesn't have any animation-specific features, but seeing what Stardew has achieved, it's defintely possible to do great graphics in it.
Incidentally, concernedApe recommends this site for people wanting to get into pixel art. On programs, it has to say:
There are plenty of good programs out there for pixel art, many of which are free. I use Grafx2, but GraphicsGale, Pro Motion, Photoshop, Pixen, and MS Paint are all common choices. Some are more user friendly than others, which is why I choose something with keyboard shortcuts like Grafx2 over MS Paint, it has saved me many trips to the toolbar (and makes for much easier palette management).
Krita I think is very nice to work I am using it on Ubuntu, but they have Windows version as well. you should try it. Many tutorials can be found on YT so very easy way to start working with it.
