Questions, answered.

Signing up is free, and the whole editor comes with your account. AI features use a monthly AI allowance that comes with every account. Every prompt card shows its estimate before you run it, every result shows what it used, and the biggest jobs ask first.

Drawing in Pixelart Makers needs an account. Signing up is free, and Continue with Google makes it one click. You can view pieces people have published without one, and the demos on this site run right in your browser if you want a feel for it first.

No. Pixelart Makers runs in a desktop browser and saves to the cloud as you draw.

The editor is built for desktop browsers. On a touchscreen or with a pen, the canvas draws with one finger or the pen, pans and zooms with two fingers, and a quick two-finger tap undoes. Your file list also works on phones.

With an email and password, or with Google.

Each artboard can be up to 256 × 256 pixels with up to 256 frames and 64 layers, and a file can hold up to 100 artboards. Palettes hold up to 256 colours.

Yes: red and blue onion skin, tags with Forward, Reverse and Ping-pong directions and repeat counts, linked cels, a loop section and a floating preview window.

Yes. A tilemap layer paints with a tileset: draw pixels and repeated tiles are reused while new ones join the tileset, or switch to Draw tiles and stamp tiles from the Tileset panel. Tiled mode repeats an artboard around itself so you can paint seamless tiles.

Choose the Classic keymap for classic pixel-editor defaults, or Hybrid, which adds design-tool navigation. Custom key bindings aren't available. See every shortcut on the shortcuts page.

Shortcuts follow key positions, not key labels, and never clash with your browser. ⌘ is Ctrl on Windows and Linux.

On an RGB artboard, no: choosing a palette changes the colours you paint with, and existing pixels keep their colours. To recolour that art, use Replace color, or Restyle to palette to snap it to your palette. On an Indexed artboard, pixels follow their palette entries, so editing the palette recolours the art; after switching palettes, Remap palette puts every pixel back on the nearest new colour.

Yes. Every artboard is RGB, Indexed or Grayscale. Start a new artboard in any mode, or convert one with dithering and a before and after preview. Check palette… finds pixels that aren't on the palette.

Yes. Drop a .gpl, .hex, .pal, .act or .col file on the canvas to replace or extend your palette, or use Import palette…, which also reads PNG palettes. You can save yours in any of those formats or as a PNG strip.

Turn on palette lock on the prompt card before you generate, and every sprite, edit, fill and animation frame is matched to your artboard's palette. For art you already have, Restyle to palette snaps it to your colours.

PixelLab is an AI made for pixel art. In Pixelart Makers it powers the Sprite engines for Make a sprite, Edit with prompt and Fill selection, plus Remove background, Animate from here, Generate in-betweens, Rotate to directions and the prompt wand on Sprite engines. Variations, Render sketch, Erase and Isolate object, Edit frames and the clean-up actions can run on a Sprite engine too.

Yes, all through PixelLab: Animate from here turns a pose into a walk, run, idle, attack or jump; Generate in-betweens draws the frames between two poses; Rotate to directions draws a sprite facing 4 or 8 ways. New frames arrive as a draft on their own layer for you to keep or retouch, and palette lock keeps animations and in-betweens on your colours.

No. Pixelart Makers connects to PixelLab for you, and what you generate comes out of the monthly AI allowance of your Pixelart Makers account.

A second image engine that paints a more illustrative picture. Pixelart Makers then rebuilds it into real pixel art: hard edges, a transparent background, and your colour count or palette.

Every account gets a monthly AI allowance. Every prompt card shows an estimate before you run it, every result shows the real cost after, and the biggest jobs ask first. If you use it all, AI pauses until the start of next month, and everything else in the editor keeps working.

No. Results land as a draft layer or a new artboard, and you keep or discard them. If you leave a draft undecided with the file open, Pixelart Makers keeps it after 10 minutes; set Keep results automatically to Never in Preferences › AI to always decide yourself. One ⌘Z undoes the whole AI step, and a merge is refused if that layer changed in the meantime, so a result never paints over newer strokes.

You can press Cancel, but once PixelLab starts a job it finishes it, so a cancelled job still counts against your monthly AI allowance. That's why Pixelart Makers shows the estimate first and asks before Max-quality jobs.

Yes. They see the placeholder with your avatar and its progress. The result waits for you: only you can keep or discard it.

In Pixelart Makers, choose AI agents in your account menu on the files page, or Preferences › AI agents in the editor, and copy the server address, https://pixelartmakers.com/api/mcp. In your assistant's MCP settings, add it as a remote server; AI agents has steps for common assistants. The first time it connects, Pixelart Makers opens in your browser: sign in if you need to, read what it will be able to do, and press Allow. There's no API key to copy and nothing to install. More on the AI assistants page.

Any MCP client that connects to remote servers over Streamable HTTP and signs in with OAuth: coding agents, chat assistants and code editors with MCP support. Clients that only run local servers, or only take an API key, can't connect. Pixelart Makers offers them 8 tools, and search reaches the rest of the editor.

List and create sprites; read a sprite's outline of artboards, layers, frames and tags; look at any frame enlarged, as a text grid of up to 64 × 64 pixels with its colours, and with checks for stray pixels and missing outlines; draw with shapes, pixel patches, fills, colour swaps, mirrors, flips, shifts and outlines, up to 300 steps in one call; and find and run editor actions, whole-sprite operations such as resizes, colour modes and filters, and Pixelart Makers' AI features. It can't import or export files: you do that in Pixelart Makers as usual.

It acts as you: the sprites you can open, including files teammates shared with you, and no others. It can create sprites in your account, start AI features, which use your monthly AI allowance, and change your saved library: save and replace palettes, and remove saved palettes and brushes. It can't delete whole files, change your editor preferences or manage which apps you've connected. Locks and a teammate's running operation stop it the way they stop you, and like you it can unlock a layer, so a lock guards against slips rather than keeping it out.

Yes. Its edits land in the shared file as they happen, like a teammate's, so anyone with the file open sees them. It has no cursor of its own.

Changes made over MCP happen outside your editor tab, so ⌘Z in your tab doesn't reach them. Ask your assistant to put things back instead: deleted layers, frames and artboards can be restored for 24 hours, and whole-sprite operations such as a resize can be reverted. Asking it to draw on a new layer keeps its pixels apart from yours. With WebMCP, a browser agent's edits go into your tab's undo history like your own.

Only when it starts one of Pixelart Makers' AI features, and then just as if you had: the same monthly AI allowance and the same limits. The biggest jobs, like Make a sprite on a PixelLab Sprite engine at Max, stop at their estimate until your assistant confirms them, so ask it to check with you first. Drawing, looking and editor actions don't use the allowance.

WebMCP is a proposed web standard that lets a web page offer tools to an AI agent in the browser. In browsers that support it, an open Pixelart Makers editor offers a browser agent the same tools for the sprite on screen, all but creating new sprites. Its edits are your tab's own: they show up on your canvas and go into its undo history like yours. Access works differently there: there's no Allow step and nothing to disconnect under AI agents, because your browser decides which agent can use the page, and the tools go away when you close the tab. You don't need it for the MCP server, and in other browsers nothing changes.

Choose AI agents in your account menu on the files page, or Preferences › AI agents in the editor, then press Disconnect next to the app under Connected apps. Its access ends at once: its sign-in and your approval are removed, so using it again means connecting it and pressing Allow again.

Yes. Anyone you send a link to signs up free, or signs in with Google, and joins the file as an editor.

Choose Share › Copy edit link and send the link. Anyone who opens it and signs in joins the file as an editor, and the file shows up under Shared with me.

Only people who have its link and sign in, and anyone with the link can edit, so share it with the people you're making the game with. If you publish the file, anyone can view the published copy, and signed-in people can remix it into a file of their own if you allow remixes, but neither gives them your file or its link.

Not for the file itself: everyone you share its link with can edit, so share it with your team only. To show your work to anyone, publish it: people can view the published copy without an account, but they can't edit your file.

The last stroke wins, and you see it happen because cursors are live. Undo skips pixels a teammate changed: if a teammate painted over your stroke, your ⌘Z keeps their pixels and tells you how many it kept.

No. Your ⌘Z steps back through your own edits only, and it skips pixels a teammate changed since. If a teammate deleted something by mistake, they can bring it back with ⌘Z, or with Undo on the toast.

Inside a file, yes: deleting a layer or artboard shows a toast with Undo, and ⌘Z brings back layers, frames and artboards with their pixels. Edit › Undo history lists every step you took, so you can jump back several at once. Undo lives in your browser tab, so it's gone after a reload. Deleting a whole file from your file list is permanent, and only its owner can do it.

PNG, GIF and Animated PNG (animations become frames), JPEG, WebP and BMP images; numbered image sequences; sprite sheets through Import sprite sheet…; .gpl, .hex, .pal, .act and .col palettes, plus PNG palettes through Import palette…; and .pixelart files. Images larger than 256 px are scaled down with nearest neighbour, and a small image dropped on an artboard lands as floating pixels. Files can be up to 16 MB.

PNG, animated GIF, Animated PNG, WebP, JPEG, numbered PNGs in a .zip, a PNG strip, and sprite sheets with JSON (hash or array, strips, rows, columns or packed, with trim, extrude and merged duplicates), all at 0.5× to 20×, from the whole canvas, the selection or a slice. Also palettes (.gpl, .hex, .pal, .act, .col, PNG strip) and complete .pixelart files.

Sprite sheets come with the standard JSON (hash or array) that Phaser, Godot, Unity and LibGDX read. You can also export PNGs, GIFs, Animated PNGs and numbered PNG sequences.

The JSON is the standard sprite-sheet format (hash or array) that Phaser, Godot, Unity and LibGDX read, with frame positions, durations, tags, layers and slices. Check your engine's sprite-sheet importer for the variant it expects.

Other editors' own file formats don't open in Pixelart Makers. Export a PNG sheet or a GIF from your current editor and bring it in: Import sprite sheet… cuts a sheet into frames, and GIF frames keep their timing.

Pixelart Makers needs a connection because it saves as you draw. You can download a complete .pixelart copy of any file at any time.

If the machine runs a current desktop browser, yes. There's nothing to install.