Aseprite

I’ve had Aseprite installed for quite a while, but I never could quite make myself use it.  I guess I’m just too comfortable with Gimp.  Well, I made myself use it a bit this past weekend.  I compiled the latest source from their git repo and gave it a shot.

Here’s the verdict:  All in all, it’s a pretty good program for editing sprites.  There are some caveats though:

  • Crashed when I was exporting sprite strips multiple times.
  • Slow, if you load a large image like a screenshot so that you can crop out an object.  The cursor actually lags moving across the canvas in that situation.
  • Zooming isn’t relative to the center of your sprite, so you find yourself needing to scroll/drag around a lot.

There are a few nice features too though, like letting you create multiple frames and playing it as an animation.  It also lets you import spritesheets… but apparently if every cell is of a fixed size.

One cool thing is that if you create a multi-frame sprite, and save it as a PNG, it will export with the frames sequentially numbered.  This works great with TilePacker and the classes I’ve thrown together to load my Mobs.