A sprite editor for retro console games

Draw the parts once.
Build every pose
from them.

Cut your sprite sheet into body parts, assemble poses, animate them step by step and stage whole scenes.

Classic console games saved memory by building characters from small shared pieces. Modular Sprite Editor lets you work the same way, and shows how your sprites fit the Mega Drive while you draw.

Open the documentation Get the editor

Free and open source, for Windows, macOS and Linux.

A pixel-art sword fight: the Prince slashes, a hooded guard blocks with sparks, and the fight goes on until the guard is thrown to the ground — The Swordfight scene from the example project. The guard is the Prince, drawn with a different set of parts.

Made for pixel art: whole-pixel zoom, no smoothing Every part, frame and animation stays editable Exports for the Mega Drive (SGDK) and RetroAnimator

From a sheet of parts to a scene

Four steps, one project.

Each step builds on the one before. Change a part and every pose, animation and scene that uses it changes with it.

Thirteen small body parts of the Prince, each in its own outline

01

Cut the sheet into modules

Drag a box around each part, or let the editor find the sprites on the sheet.

The Prince's pose built from the parts, every part outlined

02

Build poses from parts

Place, flip and turn parts to make a frame. Reuse the same pieces in every pose.

A sword slash drawn over a faint copy of the step before it

03

Animate step by step

Set how long each pose holds, watch it play like the game will, compare with onion skin.

The Prince slashes while the guard blocks

04

Stage a scene

Put characters on a timeline, move them with keys and switch their animations on cue.

Try it with your own sheet

Variants without redrawing

One set of animations.
As many characters as you like.

A mapping swaps some parts for others in every frame at once. Recolour a costume, change the armour, hide a weapon, or turn the hero into an enemy.

In the example project, the hooded guard is the Prince with 28 head and body parts swapped. He uses all of the Prince's animations without a single extra frame.

Make a variant with a mapping

The same pose twice: the Prince, and the hooded guard made with the Normal mapping

Know what the console can show

See the limits
before your programmer does.

The Mega Drive draws characters from hardware sprites, with a limit per screen and per line. Turn on the budget overlay and the editor outlines every hardware sprite a pose needs and marks the lines where sprites would vanish.

Read the budget overlay

The Frames tab with the Mega Drive budget overlay: the slash pose outlined in hardware sprites, with a readout of sprites, tiles and the busiest line — 16 hardware sprites and 41 tiles for this pose. The busiest line uses 10 of 20 sprites.

Already have whole sprites?

Let the editor find
the shared parts.

Auto Modularize cuts a sheet of finished sprites into the pieces they have in common, including mirrored ones, and rebuilds every frame from them, pixel for pixel. A slider trades less memory against fewer hardware sprites.

873 → 595video memory tiles for 38 Sonic sprites

32 %less memory, same pixels

Find shared parts automatically

The Auto Modularize window with a Sonic sprite cut into shared parts and the memory cost before and after — Auto Modularize on a sheet of 38 whole Sonic sprites.

A workspace made for sprites

Everything about a character
in one window.

Five tabs share one project: Modules, Frames, Animations, Timeline and Mappings. Drag parts from a library onto the stage, nudge them pixel by pixel, and undo anything in any tab.

Take the tour