I want to make a pixel art video game. Has anyone used GIMP?

I’m thinking about starting a pixel art video game, and I’ve heard Gimp is a great software to use. I’ve only heard of it being done once though? "

GIMP is a raster graphics editor, started by Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball, who began developing the software at UC Berkeley in 1995. It can be most closely compared in capability and features to Adobe Photoshop.

GIMP is a free to use open source program, that has garnered many programming contributors from all around the world, who have steadily improved the software.

Growing use and popularity

GIMP had a slow adoption for many years and was mostly used on Linux operating systems only due to compatibility issues of mainstream softwares and Linux’s philosophy of supporting only open source options on its Linux distributions. Due to the growing capabilities of GIMP and its known use by artists and various developers, the software has continued to grow in popularity.[4] In 2015, for the first time, GIMP was used to create all of the art in a published video game, called Lucas the Game by Timothy Courtney. Lucas the Game was made popular when it was published in July 2015 and then mass distributed in the Groupees Psychic Pixel Party Bundle alongside other video games such as Synonymy (narrated by Richard Dawkins), Subterrarium, Hypercronius, Sword Of The Samurai, and Pixel Poetry: A Film About Games, Art, Society, and Culture.[5] In 2015, Courtney wrote about the development of the Lucas the Game and his use of GIMP to make all of the art.[6] Events like this contributed to the widespread growing knowledge of GIMP’s capabilities in large and professional projects. As more artists and developers learned of other uses by GIMP, they also became more willing to start using GIMP as opposed to the then ubiquitously used Adobe Photoshop.
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Has anyone here ever made anything big in GIMP? It seems a little tricky to learn and I’m feeling overwhelmed. Any help would be appreciated.

You can make pixel art in any image editor that allows you to control things on a per-pixel level, so yes GIMP will work just fine. All you really need to know for the basics of pixel art is how to resize the canvas, zoom in and out, utilize the pencil tool, and change colors (and maybe create a color palette).

Anything beyond that is going to be specific to whatever game engine you’re using and whether you want to emulate the look of any particular hardware.

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