Aseprite

The tool is built around the constraints of the style. Palettes are first-class, so colours can be swapped across a whole sprite at once; the pencil does not anti-alias unless asked; onion skinning and a frame timeline make animation a drawing task rather than a curve-editing one. Tags on the timeline separate idle, walk and attack inside one file, and export produces the sheet and the metadata a game actually loads.

In production the useful parts are the unglamorous ones: tileset modes for building connected terrain, layer groups that keep a character's parts separate, and a scripting interface for batch exports when a project has hundreds of sprites. Studios that list it usually expect an artist to deliver finished, correctly named sheets rather than loose images.

It appears alongside the style itself, which is tagged as Pixel Art, and next to general raster tools used for concepts and interface work.