Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Pixen - pixel art editor for mac

We took part to itch.io:s Flappy Jam and I needed pixel art editor for making graphics. Matt Rajcas Pixen is a good choice.

I had some experience with Pixen earlier but now I needed to download it again. I found out that Pixen is now paid app in mac App Store. But I was more than happy to pay for it. Making apps is not easy job and developers need money too. Often I see people complaining about paid apps but if you need it you buy it. Under 10 euros is not much for a productivity app.


Pixens interface is very simple and classic

Pixen has all the basic drawing tools, layers and even tools for animating. It supports also full screen mode, pinch zoom on the touchpad and Wacom tablets. You can set different tools to both mouse buttons. Only feature I sometimes miss is type tool.

Making pixel art is fun. It is like playing with Lego's. They never look realistic but you can still make awesome stuff. It also reminds me of Dr. Halo - program we used when we were kids. I think it came with Genius Mouse. With Dr. Halo we made lots of graphics for Space Quest inspired game. It had also some animation tools so we also made few simple animations of protagonist mostly just walking around. Back then we had also our first game made. It was called Death Boxing and I drew graphics with Dr. Halo.

I'll think I'll be spending more time with Pixen in near future. After Flappy Jam I got new idea for a game and I need to start sketching. I'll get back to that when I have something to show.