what software are you using? late 2017 edition

Hello,

Which software are people currently using to create NES graphics? I've found a number of tools, but some are quite old and appear to be unmaintained.

Ideally, I'd like to sit down with a handful of tools and evaluate them, but I'm not sure which of them should be on the short list.

Thanks for any pointers!

-Mick

Here's what I use:

• GIMP for just drawing.
• Aseprite for animation.
• NES Screen Tool for assembly and preparation for NES.
• Other custom tools that work similarly to NES Screen Tool, just modified for more specific purposes.

You may note that GIMP and Aseprite are just regular graphics tools (though Aseprite has an explicit pixel focus, and GIMP works well for pixel art too). It doesn't matter that they're not NES-specific, once you know the rules of what the NES can do it's easy to make NES-ready art in most good graphics programs.

YY-CHR is also popular because it can edit graphics tiles directly from a ROM, but it hasn't been updated in many years and it's not really that capable as an art program. I don't like to use it because once you learn to get the data out of or into a ROM, there's no advantage left for YY-CHR.

Brad,

You have to be one of the nicest people on the Internet! Thanks for the detailed response.

P.S.
I can't wait for Lizard!

I use mtpaint mostly

If NESST was great when i began a year and a half ago, it's indispensible now with the lasest added features. I really recommend reading through the readme/changelog because there's quite a few neat features you might miss otherwise.

The only feature i think i "miss" frequently at this point is something like a "save selection to file" + "load file to clipboard" combo so i could easily cut and paste between several NESST instances.

Since i need the adobe suite for other things, i'm also using PS and AE for some stuff, especially for trying out sprites/animations on top of backgrounds and see how they fare.

Gimp and mtPaint to draw, then my tools at https://github.com/clbr/nes to convert to/from PNG and manipulate tiles.

I use Paint for static stuff, and Photoshop or GIMP for animations.

I like to hand draw as much as possible to start.

Well, I just bought Aseprite to convert the sketch to 8-bit, by manually redrawing it (it can do 8-bit animations).

But then I have to redraw it AGAIN in YY-CHR, save the CHR. (I'm sure tepples has automated this part).

And I open it in NES Screen Tool, and make metatiles and metasprites. Export the metasprites. Screenshot to save a pic of the metatiles. Crop in GIMP.

Use Tiled to construct the levels from the screenshot of the metatiles. Export csv. Use a python script to compress the data. Import into game.

I can't recommend PyxelEdit enough. Especially for background graphics, it's really good for making tilesets.

Aseprite is cool too, though, once you learn all the shortcut keys.

A combination of Paint Shop Pro 7 (super old, but super useful for pixel art) combined with YY-CHR.net, which allows me to copy/paste between it and PSP7.

I'm very particular in that I want to see the graphics in their final form as I'd arrange them in CHR (even when dealing with smaller chunks or graphics that will be compressed later).

(Though I'm also biased in that I've written a plugin for YY-CHR.net to deal with Neo-Geo FIX format tiles...)

For nametable layout stuff, I'll echo NES Screen Tool; really good software there. Haven't really gotten to the point where I use its sprite facilities, but the few times I've messed around with it, I've found it easy to use.

Well, it might be shameless, but the credits file included with Indivisible has basically all the software I used, where to get it, and what I used it for.

Aseprite (Nearly all animation, tileset planning, some promotional material editing) - http://www.aseprite.org/

Pyxel Edit (Ensuring tile counts/Tileset finalization) - http://pyxeledit.com/

NES Screen Tool (Metasprite layouts) - https://shiru.untergrund.net/software.shtml

YY-CHR (Conversion of some of my graphics to the format NES understands) - http://www.geocities.jp/yy_6502/yychr/

Custom stuff: Two tools to remove duplicate tiles and prepare sprite data made in NES Screen Tool for the extreme bank swapping Indivisible does, and one tool that will take a (possibly animated) image, check it for background errors and create a tileset compatible with bankswapping animation, a metatileset, and a tilemap to be used with Tiled so levels can be built with 16x16 parts.

Pyxel Edit lacking easy tile copying really harms it... I share this image a lot: http://i.imgur.com/qigHvaN.gif

But it also doesn't really allow one to work with palettized images. I'm working on a small replacement of it for my workflow.

Even without those things it still beats everything for a tile-based workflow, but I always get a little sad that it's really close to being way better than it is...

Edit: Though I really, really don't like it, it's worth looking at Pro Motion. If you can get used to its UI, it is very powerful, and also allows tilemap editing.

And for good measure, one obscure program which fixes some of Pyxel Edit's tile problems, but I still end up preferring Pyxel Edit: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=14983.0

I'm amazed people mention GIMP for drawing things. That program seems like it was designed to be impossible to use from the start. I once tried to use it to resize an image, but even that simple task is almost impossible to do with GIMP (at least not without looking up a tutorial) so much is this program counter-intuitive. I can't imagine drawing anything with that.

Several years ago i was on a budget and used a combo of GIMP and irfanview as a substitute for PS.
. Can't say i liked it - everything just took a little longer and i never got used to it.

For years I looked at GIMP and didn't know where to start with it and gave up and uninstalled before every figuring out how to use it every time. (I used Paint.NET instead, which is a pretty good simple paint program but it's not very powerful.)

Then I watched this tutorial, and it really got me started:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PONe4IIYSnQ

Since then I've been pretty comfortable with it.

So, in case anyone is interested in learning GIMP for pixel art, I highly recommend that video. (Otherwise there's plenty of other good art tools. I just happen to like GIMP.)

_{Sorry, I linked it already in my post above, but it was kind of buried as a footnote.}

Yeah I would never recommend GIMP to anyone

There's a theme/mod to Gimp that makes it look like Photoshop, IIRC called GimpShop.

Unfortunately there are some cautionary notes about "GIMPShop".

Actually, having used Photoshop for over a decade, and switching to GIMP...I hate a few things about it.

In Photoshop, if you were drawing, you could do something (alt click) to quickly get an eye dropper. Doesn't work in GIMP.

In Photoshop, dragging a selection moves it, clicking off the selection drops it.

In GIMP, you have to select, then choose "float selection" then move it, with a specific 4 arrow move tool, then you have to switch tools again to the select tool, point it somewhere off the selection until it becones an anchor icon to drop the selection. 4 slow steps instead of 2 quick ones.

But Photoshop is too damned expensive. I refuse to "rent" a software. Out of principal, I can't do it.


Edit - I'm looking at GIMP docs it looks like CTRL click from a paint tool will do an eyedropper. I could swear I tried that and it didn't work. ? Next time I'll try it.


Does anyone know a fast way to import a pallette to Aseprite? The NES one is a little off, and I don't want to edit each color manually.

I definitely use the eyedropper ("color picker" tool) constantly, and I'm used to just pressing O on the keyboard for that. (Or similarly I'm used to using the keyboard to choose a tool in most cases.) I don't know if you can make it behave exactly like photoshop, but you can remap the keyboard and mouse buttons quite a bit. You could certainly at least assign it to a key that's close to where Alt is? Personally I just got used to the default keys for everything.


As for selections... the selection tools just select an area for operations to occur, and then a "float" action will make a movable floating layer from the current selection, so... yes that's two steps compared to something like MSPaint where the selection immediately and always picks up stuff underneath, but I got used to the selection being a more primitive thing, a tool I use with other tools. There's a lot of versatility to being able to work with the selections by themselves prior to combining them with another action. Like the eyedropper, though, you can get to float quickly by learning its keyboard shorcut. Or just a quick cut and paste accomplish the same thing as well.

...but once you've made the float, if you haven't changed tools yet it actually behaves exactly as you're asking. Dragging on it will move the float. Clicking off it will put it down. Putting it down is actually called "anchor layer" in GIMP. This is also why the action happens to be in the "Layer" menu, not the "Select" menu... this is not intuitive, but that's where it is.

Another part of the problem you're having is that only the selection tools (rectangle, circle, lasso, etc.) behave like this with the float layer. All of them can move it or anchor it. Every other tool can't. The move tool can move it, but can't anchor it (its intended use is for moving your permanent layers around, and it behaves the same way for all layers, including the float-- no anchor action). What you really want is one of the selection tools instead.

One more thing, if you have changed to another tool, there is still a keyboard shortcut to anchor the float from anywhere (Ctrl+H by default), which is really handy anyway because it's pretty normal to want to change tools mid-float.

There's maybe some other weird side-issues here, like if you click and drag with a selection tool starting off the float, then you'll create a new selection rectangle that restricts where the float will paste to within that selection. That's a bit weird, but if you're expecting this it can actually be useful. If you do it by accident though, it probably looks like you've deleted your float.


Anyhow, pretty understandable that this feels terrible when you don't know what's going on. Once you've switched tools, there's really no way to anchor the floating layer by clicking unless you know that you have to switch back to selection, or know that it's called "anchor" and it's in the "layer" menu, etc. all of that is not what I'd expect either. You're in a situation where you want to put that float down and you can't see any clear way to do it!

...but there are 3 ways to do it, and they can be learned! They're not hard to do once you know where to look, and GIMP in general can be very expedient when you're used to it. Once you get oriented a bit, you start to understand where to find things. For instance, hovering over any tool should show you its keyboard shortcut on a tooltip, or you can find them in the menus. Experiment a lot and press Ctrl+Z to undo. Or better yet, find the undo history and take a look at the names of all your actions.


Anyhow, I'm not saying all this to try and argue people into using GIMP, I don't really care if nobody else likes GIMP (use what works for you!), I'm just trying to help with the complaints as given.

Put the palette in a PNG (or GIF) and load it.


Ha! I didn't know about that one! Thanks for the tip.

GIMP is a fine drawing program, but it's not really specialized for any specific purpose, which makes it generally lacking for every potential purpose. I used to hear people namedrop it as an "open source alternative" to Photoshop, which I think is extremely insulting towards Photoshop. Not only is the interface just nowhere near as sleek (as partly covered by above posts), it simply doesn't have a fraction of the features PS has.

I guess it's useful as a fallback program until you find a better one for whatever needs you have. (for example - aseprite, pyxeledit, etc.)

I can recommend aseprite. It's not free, but not too expensive and great for pixel art animation. It also has a convenient output format that puts all frames and layers in a single PNG on a grid with a JSON to describe the location of different objects. There's a command line interface which I use in my build system to convert the .ase files into a png and json, and then I created a Python script to automatically created de-duplicated metasprites and convert everything to NES format.

Other than that I do use GIMP as well.

As an aside -- what strategies does everyone use for defining the order of colors in images? My technique is to make the top row of pixels be a set of palettes. So pixels 0, 4, 8... represent colors that map to 0, pixels 1, 5, 9... map to 1, etc. That decides the bitplanes for the colors in the images. Those colors are mapped to the closest NES color then defined as constants, like PLAYER_PALETTE_1_0

I personally find GIMP hard to use, though I'm sure it's pretty powerful for being free once you learn how to use it.

I recommend Paint.NET for people who use paint, but want layers, magic wand, and some color adjusting functionality. It's pretty easy to use, though I find just a couple of things annoying. One, it appears that when you have an image in a layer that extends outside of the canvas, you lose the portion that extends outside of the canvas. So if you decide to move the layer later, that part of the image is gone for good. The other thing I think is weird is that it doesn't automatically create a new layer when you copy/paste something into the document. It assumes you want to paste flat into the layer you are on, which I find normally isn't the case. If I'm pasting something on top of an existing image, I want it to be on a separate layer so I can move or delete it later if I want.

Normally I just manually draw stuff in YY-CHR and that works for me. It's already set to 2BPP, it's got the color palette ready to go, it helps you figure out what you need in terms of tiles right off the bat. Then again, I don't do a lot of sprite layering, so other programs might help more for this.

My method is pretty much identical to Dougeff.

I do all the initial doodling in YY-chr, and then once I like it enough I add it to the master CHR file. Nesst I use for testing metasprites/animations, and for doodling things like title screens or any other screens in the game that don't use metatiles. Then I save all the metatiles in a png file and use Tiled to edit metatile maps.

Is there a general concensus on Tiled? It has a lot of features and it's been working for everything I've needed to do so far in my current project, but I'm not too attached to it.

I love it. There's a few features that I wish it had, but overall, it works well, has a good save file format, and doesn't frustrate me. Which is more than I can say from most similar tools.

Heres some graphics packages I use:

Photoshop
- at the end of the day, it's still the best for starting the base graphics, and keeping sets of ideas or assets.

Aseprite
- having used probably all pixelart solutions, this is hands down the best for animation.

Grafx2
- this is my alternative to PyxelEdit, it has great tile tools and the gradient tools are close to the awesome (and still yet unparalleled) tools in Deluxe Paint.

NESscreen Tool
- since the addition of scrolling levels, this tool is now indispensable.

Cinema4D
- sometimes, you need fancy fake 3D, and this a great tool for getting results quickly. Easy to pick up for beginners too, as the interface is "artist friendly".
example

Illustrator
- can be handy to wireframe things like logos, or splines for importing to Cinema4D. I used it to make the Pixel Pirate logo base.

Tools I'd like to use but fall short:

Deluxe Paint
- Can't get together a reliable workflow, it's too jarring to be in DOS world then back to OSX.

Tiled
- I use this for non NES projects, would be nice if they had a NES palette preview mode but lets face it, it's never going to happen.