Hey guys, I'm a newer gamedev who has always been bad at art. Thus most of my newer creations are pixel art sprites and various shaders to affect them haha. I mostly used Asesprite white GIMP for the normal mapping. Sometimes if I need tiles or textures I use Substance Designer. But today I bought Spriter Pro, Texture Packer, and Sprite Illuminator and they are really helping out my animation process and automating some of the mundane parts of actually packing sprites. Which led me to these questions! So, what do you use, what are you trying to achieve artistically, and what could be easier?

I use photoshop, and work more with pixel art :3

I use GIMP, mostly.

I love that it's open source and free, but of course that comes with some drawbacks. I've learned to work around most of them now. I wish I had a better set-up for animating, although I probably couldn't make use of one very well if I did anyway.

I'm not really sure how to describe my style, but its 2D and I suppose it's quite messy and low-tech.  I have to work quite small because my laptop/GIMP can't handle big files, but I'm also not very careful and I don't use a restricted palette usually, so it doesn't look like pixel art although it's often small enough to see individual pixels.

I have tried sprite lamp for dynamic lighting, but I didn't like the look of it in my style. I probably need more practice with it.

Gimp all the way for general stuff and post-processing.  I also used Inkscape sometimes, for more precision work like logos etc.

Recently I've had a go at Art Rage on my windows tablet - tricky to get used to (it mimics oil painting) but got some good and fast results.  You can check what it looks like on my game page.

For pixel art, everything is done with Pixartu on my iPad, my all time favourite app!  That means I can work on the train to and back from work, not a minute of spare time is lost ;)

I wrote a devblog on tools/software I use a while back, feel free to it check out for more details on what I use to game dev!

https://hotchpotch.games/my-indie-dev-kit

On my side, i am using photoshop and pixelmator.

I'm using Gimp, Inkscape, and for animation Unity3D plugin Anima2D. I found today a way to mix manual mouse move into an animation.

Inkscape

I use TVpaint ! It's made for 2d animation so it's cool to use to draw. It's not free unfortunately =/.