Aseprite
More info
- Creator
- David Capello (Igara Studio)
- Released
- Type
- Pixel-art and sprite animation editor
- License
- Proprietary, source available
- Website
- aseprite.org
- Source
- github.com/aseprite
The pixel-art editor that became the de facto standard for sprite animation — paid, yet with its source sitting openly on GitHub.
It began in 2001 as ASE, the "Allegro Sprite Editor", a free project by David Capello. In 2016 it relaunched as the paid Aseprite on Steam and itch.io for around twenty dollars, while the source stayed on GitHub under a custom licence: you may build it yourself, but not sell the compiled binaries on.
Its strength is a timeline built for animation — layers, tagged frame sequences and onion skinning — alongside tight palette work and a tilemap mode. Everything is scriptable in Lua, and a single click exports a sprite sheet with matching JSON. For the 2D indie scene it is as much a given as Photoshop once was for retouchers.