SpriteMonkey is a paint program designed specifically for creating sprite sheets and tiled icon sets. It works with tiles that are 8x8, 16x16, or 32x32 pixels in size, and contains standard paint tools plus gradiants, blur, brighten, noise, etc.

The basic idea is that you create a "tile sheet", an image that's 256x256 pixels (or whatever) that contains several separate smaller icons or tiles, each (say) 32x32 pixels in size. SpriteMonkey is designed to make it easy to edit that 32x32 image, see how it tiles against itself or other tiles, and make it easy to control what colors are used in the image.

SpriteMonkey, a standalone Windows application that's been tested on Windows XP and Windows Vista, is now in open beta: the trial version is available for download, and we're hoping you take a look. Send us some feedback and tell us of any bugs you find.

SpriteMonkey was previously known as PixelMonkey, but that is now a separate product. See below.

For more information, visit the SpriteMonkey website.

PixelMonkey is a pixel-art paint program that is being built from the SpriteMonkey code. PixelMonkey doesn't work with portions of a sprite sheet; instead, it's a standard paint program that works with each file as a single image. It includes the same paint tools that are in SpriteMonkey.

As with SpriteMonkey, PixelMonkey was developed because of an internal need we had here at Impending Studios. We use our own tools, so we want them to be as useful as possible. PixelMonkey is designed to make it easy to work with small images and limited color palettes, while still keeping the layers and advanced paint tools common to other paint programs.

PixelMonkey, a standalone Windows application that's been tested on Windows XP and Windows Vista, is now in development. To follow progress, please visit the PixelMonkey website.