Hey everyone!

I’ve spent the past three months or so working on a pixel art image editor called Stipple Effect. I’m a hobbyist game developer, and I’ve used Paint.NET for my pixel art since I was in middle school. However, I have a couple of quite ambitious games that I want to make as a solo indie dev in the next few years once I can dedicate real time to it, and I’m starting to plan ahead and think about my tech stack now before I commit to anything.

I realized that while Paint.NET is a great free resource, it’s pretty much useless for animation, and horribly inefficient for large-scale projects with lots of pixel art sprites. Instead of just buying Aseprite or something, I decided to make my own image editor. I chose to do this because I eventually want to expand it to support complex real-time preview scripting for something like what is described in this video by aarthificial, and other features particular to my needs.

Stipple Effect overview

• Supports layers, frames, and color palettes
• Has all the tools you expect from from a modern pixel art image editor
• Designed to get out of the artist’s way
• Supports workflows by having shortcuts baked in for almost every operation
• You can export a project as a PNG sprite sheet, as separate PNGs for each animation frame, as a GIF, or as an MP4 video
• Lightweight and designed specifically for pixel art, so it won’t bog you down with complicated features that are only useful for high-resolution raster or vector images

Stipple Effect is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux distros. Please check out the project page here if this might be something for you! Any and all feedback is highly appreciated!

Thank you :)