The pixel art editor you actually want.

Draw sprites, animate them on a real cel timeline, build tilemaps, wire node-based effects, and paint straight into Godot. Not just a pixel editor — a full pixel-art studio built in Rust, native and fast, and free for your first six months.

Windows today · macOS & Linux coming · opens .ase · 250+ features

Your free license includes the editor, the Godot live-sync add-on, and the MCP server for AI agents.

Godot Live Link

Paint in PixelAOI and see it move in Godot instantly. Every brush stroke, palette swap, and frame edit pushes into your running project — no export, no reimport, no editor restart. It carries all your animation tags across, and when you do want a file it exports Unity .meta, Unreal Paper2D, and Spine JSON too. Nothing else in this space does live sync.

Blueprint graphs

Wire 100+ node types into visual graphs that drive particles, canvas filters, layer operations, and AI generation — all non-destructively. Preview it live, then bake the result into your sprite or timeline. Graphs cover particle, canvas, layer, and AI work, save as reusable presets, and pop out into their own window.

AI Studio

Generate sprites, seamless tiles, and full animation sheets from six models. Bring your own provider key and pay the provider directly — no markup, no lock-in — or buy PixelAOI credits if you'd rather not manage a key. Whatever you generate lands on the canvas as ordinary, editable pixels, snapped to your palette in OKLab. Fully local, offline generation that runs on your own machine is on the way.

Tilemap editor

Build your levels without leaving the editor. Paint tiles, set collision layers, use Wang tiles for seamless auto-tiling, animate tiles, and preview parallax scrolling. Export to Tiled .tmx or straight to your engine.

Animation

A complete cel-based timeline — the one you already know, with a few things it usually doesn't have.

• Linked cels — one image shared across frames; change it once and every frame updates.
• Onion skinning with configurable opacity and range.
• Tags for idle / run / jump ranges, played forward, reversed, or ping-pong, with tag sequences to chain them.
• Variable frame timing — linger on an impact, race through a run cycle.
• Keyboard-first: arrows scrub frames, Space plays, Delete removes. Export animated GIF, sprite sheets, or straight to your engine.

For game developers

• Hitbox & hurtbox editor — per-frame hit, hurt, and collision boxes with damage, knockback, hitstun, and i-frames, exported as platformer-ready JSON.
• Cage warp — freeform mesh deformation on a 4×4 control grid.
• Particle preview — fire, smoke, sparks, and magic on your actual sprite, with burst, stream, and radial emitters.
• The Ruler — a real straightedge your brush slides along and can't paint underneath.

The everyday stuff, done right

• 20 drawing and selection tools, 7 ink types, pixel-perfect mode, fully configurable keybindings.
• Unlimited layers with 19 blend modes, groups, and clipping masks.
• Indexed color and NES-style palette cycling.
• Bitmap font editor, 9-slice editor, custom brushes, command palette, multi-document tabs, autosave.

Ship to any engine

Export in the format your engine actually expects: Godot .tres, Unity .meta, Unreal Paper2D, Spine JSON, Tiled .tmx, a lossless .ase roundtrip, animated GIF, sprite sheets with JSON, a packed texture atlas, or plain PNG at 1–16× scale.

Familiar, but further

Feature	Typical editor	PixelAOI
Layers & blend modes	Basic	19 modes, groups, clipping
Animation timeline	Yes	Cels + tags + variable timing
Tilemap editor	Rare or none	Built-in + Wang autotiling
Engine export	Manual / plugins	Native Godot / Unity / Unreal
Live engine sync	None	Godot Live Link
Node-based effects	None	Blueprint graphs (100+)
AI generation	None	6 models, your own key
Price after trial	Subscription	One-time, no subscription

Still growing

PixelAOI isn't finished — it gets bigger every month. More tools, more nodes, more exports, and local offline AI are all on the way, and every update lands free while you're in your six months. This is an editor that keeps expanding, not one you buy once and watch go stale.

Free for 6 months

Make a free account, download it, and use the whole thing — every tool, every export, no watermark, no nag. The only metered feature is cloud AI generation, and you can run that on your own key for nothing. 

After six months it's a one-time $17 to keep it — no subscription, ever, and every future update included. Those six months aren't a countdown to a paywall; they're the time we need to show you the $17 is worth it. If we don't earn it, you've lost nothing.

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