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The history section of the repo clears it up [0]

> LibreSprite originated as a fork of Aseprite, developed by David Capello. Aseprite used to be distributed under the GNU General Public License version 2, but was moved to a proprietary license on August 26th, 2016.

> This fork was made on the last commit covered by the GPL version 2 license, and is now developed independently of Aseprite.

Also I am not really sure if you can convince me that this is a open source license: https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/blob/main/EULA.txt

Not that it is a unreasonable license, but it is not open source.

[0]: https://github.com/LibreSprite/LibreSprite?tab=readme-ov-fil...

Aseprite is source available nowadays, not open source. Libresprite was then forked off of the last commit of Aseprite before the license was changed from the GPL.

1. Asperite is not open source.

2. It’s okay for two projects to do the same thing, even if you personally prefer one over the other.

Aseprite is such a joy to use that I paid for it just to support the developers

didn't even realize Aseprite is source available!

I highly recommend paying for Aseprite, it's a very good little tool.

I think Libresprite is a fork of Aseprite from before it changed its license. In that context, maybe not a big deal.

I’ve paid for a few licenses so far just to support the guy making it. It’s a crucial tool in my gamedev workflow, and really couldn’t do without.

The master branch had a commit 3 weeks ago. But also, if it worked in 2022 I would sure hope it works now. Not everything needs to be updated forever.

I use GIMP and GrafX2 for my sprite art. The latter being an old-school type program in the tradition of Deluxe Paint.

Aseprite is the best tool for pixel art full stop

The "libre" terms originates from the "free software" movement which does not like the term "open source" on philosophical grounds. In English, "free" has multiple meanings, and the romance language-derived "libre" was chosen in the past to distinguish the movement's ideals from the use of "free as in beer".

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

One example that really sticks in my mind was "Libreboot". Yes, it's supposed to represent a free BIOS/booting system. But it also sounds like the name of a library dedicated to rebooting your computer.

At least they signal that the project is open and free. What about projects using "Open" but they aren't? (See: OpenAI)

Almost any name is better than GIMP.

That's like asking a EU product to not be named Euro-{product}.

LibreOffice ?

You still have to do some post-processing work around NB, since you’ll often end up with non-aligned pixel blocks, much higher color depth, and so on.

I actually did some testing of spritesheeting with Nano Banana Pro a while back:

https://mordenstar.com/other/nb-sprites

If you use the editing capabilities and send in a grid of 32×32 cells on a 1024×1024 image, you can get it to flood-fill in each square, so you end up with properly aligned 32×32 tiles. Then you can squash it via nearest neighbor to pull the lines back out, and reduce the palette using something like unfake.js:

https://github.com/jenissimo/unfake.js

Most of the purpose of pixel art is that it's hand crafted and every pixel matters. Not much point to pixel art if you drop that aspect.

I have really struggled to get nano banana to follow size/proportion ratios for sprite art. any tips? I fed in a bunch of examples first and tried to write a really strict prompt. I wonder if any of the sw being discussed here can be programmatically controlled by claude code or similar to do sprite work

The art on header of 8bitsmith.com looks bad. More than art, the animation is very janky.

Do you really just not get how you come off shilling this kind of stuff on a discussion talking about an aseprite fork?

The intersection of people interested in Aseprite and people wanting to just spawn this stuff out of thin air is fairly low!

I always used MTPaint

https://mtpaint.sourceforge.net/

I guess it's a bit old but it works reasonably well, and supports a lot of different file formats which is occasionally useful.

I've also used GrafX2 for this kind of pixelart work. It takes cues from old Amiga paint programs

http://grafx2.chez.com/

Didn't know about Pixelorama, looks interesting.

Libresprite (since aseprite went evil) has been the only editor I can use for over a decade, glad there are others now.