Dotkiln, a pixel art editor for game sprites

Draw a sprite once. Ship it in every colour.

Shade along your palette's colour ramps, save recoloured variants of a sprite, and export sprite sheets your engine reads.

Get notified at launch See how it works

For Windows. Coming to Steam and itch.io. Pay once.

The Dotkiln editor in its light theme. A 24 by 24 green slime fills the canvas. The Palette panel shows three ramps, green, red and blue, and the Variants panel lists Original, Ember and Frost. — A 24 × 24 slime, a palette with green, red and blue ramps, and two saved variants: Ember and Frost.

The same slime twice. On the left it is one flat green with a dark outline. On the right it is shaded with five greens, from dark at the bottom right to pale at the top left.

Smart shading

Group your colours into ramps, dark to light. The Smart shade tool moves each pixel one step lighter or darker along the ramp its colour belongs to.

Skin stays on the skin ramp and steel stays on the steel ramp, so you can shade a whole character with one tool.

Three copies of the slime side by side: green, red and blue. Each is shaded with its own five-colour ramp.

Variants

Moss, Ember, Frost: one sprite, three variants. Map one ramp onto another, see the result on the canvas as you pick, and save it as a variant.

Keep drawing on the original and every variant follows. Export one variant or all of them at once.

The Remap colours dialog pairs ramp 1, the greens, with ramp 3, the blues, and names the variant Frost. The canvas behind it already shows the slime in blue. — Map one ramp onto another. The canvas previews it before you save.

The Dotkiln editor in its dark theme, previewing the Frost variant: the same slime drawn in blues. — The Frost variant in the dark theme. The pixels underneath are still green.

Exports your engine reads

Tested in Godot 4.5, Unity 6.3 and Phaser 3.90.

PNG, indexed PNG-8, animated GIF, or every frame as its own PNG.
Sprite sheets in a grid, or packed with transparent edges trimmed.
JSON in the format Aseprite uses, so existing importers work.

Also in Dotkiln

Animation. Frames with their own durations, tags with forward, reverse and ping-pong loops, onion skin, and a preview that plays while you draw. Export a whole animation or a single tag.
Autosave and crash recovery. Dotkiln saves a copy as you draw. If the app or your computer crashes, the next launch offers to restore what you had.
The usual tools. Pencil, eraser, bucket, line, rectangle, ellipse, eyedropper, selection and move, each with a shortcut. Layers with opacity, hide and lock. PNG import, and an image with 256 colours or fewer brings its palette.
Light and dark themes.

Windows first

Dotkiln 1.0 runs on Windows 10 and 11. iPad and Android versions come later, as separate apps.

The desktop app makes no network calls. It has no accounts, no telemetry and no update checks. Read the privacy policy.

Get notified at launch

Dotkiln is not on sale yet. Email [email protected] with the subject "Dotkiln updates" and we will send you one email when it reaches Steam and itch.io.

Get notified at launch