TL;DR

LibreSprite is useful for drawing pixel art, like icons/avatars/etc.

From the website:

LibreSprite is a free and open source program for creating and animating your sprites.

So well, it’s a bit more than just drawing pixel art, because it supports animation easily as well, but we still have to start drawing the first screen, right?

As a total novice in the field, and an easily distracted one, I found out about LibreSprite by means of this video: The Best FREE Software for Game Development! (In my Opinion).

I installed it in Windows in a pretty big resolution screen, and I immediately stumbled upon a bump because the program looked tiny.

I thought it had to do with some scaling in high-DPI screens and tried to move a couple of knobs in the windows preferences for the executable, but to no avail. Then I tried to search the internet - guess what? To no avail.

Then I tried to see if it has something inside the program to help us, and presto! It has a useful Edit/Preferences.../General section with two ways to tweak the appearance like this:

My next hurdle was figuring out how to zoom out. It turned out to be quite embarassing, to be honest: when the magnifier tool is selected (with Z), the left button zooms in, while the right button zooms out. To be honest, I’d much more prefer to have keyboard shortcuts for these two operations, like we have e.g. in GIMP. Maybe it’s just something I still have to find anyway.

I suffered a bit the checked background, so I wanted to disable it. It seems that there’s no option to directly do this; I resorted to setting the same color for both square positions and call it a day.

The animation world is new to me so I might suffer from inexperience, but I would have liked to see the possibility to move frames around in a few more places (e.g. in the contextual menus). I was about to abandon the moving of a frame, when my mouse went exactly over the few pixels that allow to do this movement with drag and drop. You first have to select the frame, then place the mouse in the line between the frame number and whatever it has under it, like in the screenshot below:

There are a couple of glitches here and there, but nothing that prevented me from doing an awful yet satisfying little animated GIF

I was a bit dubious (/curious) about the lack for support of animated PNG (APNG) format though, nor I seem to find out anything about it around. It seems that the latest version of ImageMagick can do the conversion, although the resulting image is a whopping 10x+ with respect to the starting GIF file, which does not seem to be an improvement.

I’m expecially confused by the fact that ImageMagick actually required me to install ffmpeg to do the conversion. I figured that I could just use it directly:

ffmpeg -i input.gif -f apng -plays 0 output.apng

It turns out that it works and the image size is smaller than the GIF.

Well, this was my adventure in doing some pixel art… or at least getting ready to do it. Stay safe!