AltusPixel

ALTUSPIXEL — PIXEL ART THAT ENDS UP IN YOUR GAME

  Draw, shade and animate. Build isometric scenes without counting pixels to get the angles right. Rig a character right on the canvas and watch it move. Then let every save deliver game-ready files straight to Godot or Unity — no plugin, no re-slicing, no export ritual.

One price. Every update free. No subscription, no DLC, no credit meter, and no generative AI — all YOU.

EASY TO START

  On open you see paint, erase, fill, move, colors and layers. Everything else stays tucked away until you want it. Press F1 for guides, or Ctrl+K and type what you are trying to do — "make it 3D", "get my picture out" — and search hands you the tool and switches it on. Guides have a Show me button that dims the app and lights up the real buttons, step by step, on your own screen. Plain-language tooltips on everything.

BUILD IN ISOMETRIC

  Isometric Mode puts a diamond grid under the canvas and lets the tools do the geometry. Lines snap to the isometric slopes. Drag a box on the floor, pull it up, click. It lands shaded — light top, darker sides. Boxes side by side join into one clean shape, so walls read as walls. Ready-made ramps, columns and rooms drop straight in. Circles lie flat on a floor or stand upright on a wall. Cast a flat drawing onto either. One click drops a floor to build the rest of the scene on. Stack tiles for cliffs and rooftops and the overlap order stays right on its own.

MATERIAL FILL

  Fill an area with a material instead of a flat color. Brick, stone, sand, grass, leaves, wood, water. Every fill is drawn in your color and tiles seamlessly. Chameleon mode keeps the shading that was already there — fill a wall that has a shadow across it and you get brick with the shadow still on it.

RIG A CHARACTER ON THE CANVAS

  Click your sprite to place a joint. Hold, and a bone grows along the arm. The bone captures the pixels near it, so dragging the limb moves only that limb. Pull the hand and the elbow sorts itself out. In a hurry, drop a preset Arm, Leg or Tentacle rig — it lands fitted to your art and shows you its move. Then Record to Frames turns poses into real, editable, grid-crisp frames that export like any other art.

ANIMATION THAT DOES THE BORING PART

  Frame-by-frame with onion skin, playback, GIF and animated WebP export — plus an engine underneath. Paint a background once and every frame follows. Pick a start and an end and the in-between frames draw themselves, straight or along an arc. Drop in a preset move that plays in front of your art. Cycle a ring of colors and a waterfall flows. A timeline shows every layer against every frame.

SHADING WITHOUT THE HARD PART

  Pick where the light comes from and Auto Shade bands crisp shading onto your flat colors — the hardest beginner wall, one dialog. Drag Chameleon across finished art to recolor it while every highlight and shadow survives. Juice Forge writes game-feel impact — the flash, the shake, the freeze — straight into your frames, with a built-in photosensitivity check.

ALSO IN THE BOX

Turn a photo into a printable stitch pattern at real physical size, for embroidery and cross-stitch. Pick Erase like a color and the brush, fill and shapes un-paint until you pick a real color again. A full palette suite: even shade ramps, a themed library, Lospec import and colorblind preview. Shaded shape starters, radial symmetry, and bending a straight strip into a clean curve. Tiles that update every placed copy when you edit one. Macros that record a cleanup once and run it on a whole folder. Pixel Doctor art check-up, blur-free social export, one-click session timelapse. One self-contained app on Windows and Linux, SteamOS included. Offline, no account, and your work stays on your machine.

MADE FOR: indie game devs, beginners who find other tools overwhelming, and anyone tired of renting their software by the month