Clean edges, alpha and palettes
The editor habits that separate an asset from a drawing: hard edges, honest alpha, and a palette you control.
You finish with
A sprite with clean outlines, correct transparency and a palette extracted from itself.
- 1
Work with an indexed palette, not a color picker
Open the Palette tab and use Extract from image (8/16/32/64 colors) on artwork you imported. Restricting the set is what makes later edits consistent — recoloring one entry updates every pixel that used it.
Open the editor - 2
Use alpha as a tool, not a mistake
The color field accepts #RRGGBBAA and has an alpha slider, so soft shadows and glass effects are real transparency in the file. Fractionally-opaque pixels stay that way through PNG and GIF export — they are not flattened on the way out.
- 3
Check fairness at 1× zoom
Zoom out regularly. Highlights that read beautifully at 800% usually collapse into noise at 100%, which is the only zoom your game uses.
The status bar always shows save status — the autosave runs 800 ms after you stop drawing.
- 4
Finish with transparency, not a background color
Erase everything outside the silhouette. A transparent background survives every engine, theme and background layer; a painted one does not.
Open the editor
Next
Make a sprite sheet
Combine frames into one game-ready PNG with the columns, spacing and scale your importer expects.
ContinueTools in this guide