JPixel For Mac

Pixel art games seem to be here to stay, as their popularity has not gone down over the years, due to a number of reasons. They are generally very easy to produce, cheap or completely free, and run on older machines that can no longer handle modern games. Moreover, many players simply love their retro look, as it reminds them of the early days of the industry.

JPixel is a lightweight app intended to help you make pixel art animations and create tilesets for your indie games. It is relatively simple and offers few advanced functions, being aimed mostly at novices looking to learn the basics of game development.

If you are still learning your way around graphic editors, JPixel should not give you too many headaches. The necessary tools are not difficult to access, and the user interface has an intuitive layout.

The utility provides multiple useful instruments: pencil, bucket, eyedropper, eraser and selection tool, all of which are easily accessible from the app’s side panel.

JPixel is quite versatile, as you can export your pixel art designs to sprite sheets or create animated GIFs, mockup tilesets and export them as PNG image files, as well replace colors or tiles in a palette to have them be changed in the project automatically.

The application also allows you to quickly modify parameters such as hue shift, brightness, contrast or saturation.

JPixel is, of course, not suitable for very complex projects, as it offers a somewhat limited number of features, but it has everything a novice designer needs to create artwork and animations while learning the basics. It is unfortunate that an in-depth tutorial is not included, but even beginners should get the hang of things in no time.