Alright, so we all know that I am not the best at making good looking sprites. That’s not going to stop me from sharing this great program! Where Pyxel Edit falls short, Aseprite shines! This wont be a tutorial but a touch base I suppose. We are going to make a spinning coin and export it as a gif. Though you can use this in Unity for your game as well.
What is Aseprite?
Aseprite is a program that is used for making pixel based sprites. It has a lot of useful tools that make pixel based sprites way easier to manage. Its also simple enough that it wont feel intimidating to new users. The program is 15 dollars at https://www.aseprite.org/ and I feel its well worth it. Not sponsored I just think its a great program.
New Project in Aseprite.
So when you open the program, just like many others, you will open a new project.
Here you can select your pixel size of the project you want.
For this project I’m going to use a 16 by 16 as its for a phone game.
The Tools in Aseprite.
The tools in Aseprite are mostly located on the right hand side, with most icons having a drop down menu with different variations of each tool. So keep that in mind if you cant find something, more then likely Aseprite has it.
You can zoom in on the picture with the mouse wheel, but there is a Zoom Tool if you are on a laptop.
You can click on the Foreground Color box in the bottom right to bring up your hex codes.
So here I’m going to grab the Ellipse Tool and make simple circle to start with. Then I’m going to grab the Bucket Tool and fill in the circle. Its pretty much like paint at this point.
Next I’m going to add some details to flesh the coin out more.
Animating the Coin in Aseprite.
Now that you have your coin, do it again. Just at different angles. Simply right click the number 1 at the bottom of the screen and select New Frame, or you can use the hot keys Alt+N for new.
A short cut you can take is to flip the sprite for each of the images so you can cut back on designing each frame.
Once all of your coin frames are made, you can hit the Play button to see it in action!
The end result being (hopefully) a coin spinning!
Do you know of any awesome programs?
Let me know in the comments below!