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Frequently Asked Questions

Licensing & Commercial

Editing

Files

Configuration

Windows Specific

macOS Specific

Linux Specific

Steam Specific

About Itself

Licensing & Commercial

What do I get when I buy Aseprite?

In addition to support Aseprite development, when you pay for Aseprite you'll get:

  • A Windows installer and a portable .zip application, signed by Igara Studio S.A., developer team of Aseprite
  • A macOS app bundle (.dmg package), signed by Igara Studio S.A., a registered Apple developer
  • Ubuntu 32-bit and 64-bit .deb packages for Ubuntu 18.04 or greater. These packages can be uncompressed and executed in other distributions too (Fedora, etc.)
  • A Steam key to get automatic updates.
  • Updates up to v1.9. See the roadmap for more information about new features that will be included in v1.x version series.
  • Priority support via email (support@aseprite.org)

Do I get updates?

Yes, you do. With your purchase you will be able to download updates from Humble Bundle, Gumroad, itch.io, or Steam up to Aseprite v1.9. With the Steam key, the program will be updated automatically from the Steam client.

See details about how do you update your Aseprite version.

How much does it cost?

$19.99/USD is the minimum pledge amount to get the convenient .exe and .dmg files of the 1.x version series of Aseprite —refer to the roadmap to see what features we plan to implement in this series—. You're welcome to pledge more if you think it's worth it!

You can use the donation page in case you already own Aseprite and want to show your support.

Can I create assets for a game which I intend to sell?

Sure you can! We encourage it and we'd love to hear about your game on Twitter.

Can I use Aseprite in several of my computers?

Yes, you can. Official Aseprite packages are distributed under a specific EULA, and you are able to copy the program as many times as you want on your computers (and in different operating systems).

Can I install Aseprite in 5, 10, or more computers buying just one copy?

If they are your own computers, yes you can. If you are in a company, you need one license for each developer. If you are in an educational institution, you can request a special license for educational purposes.

Is there an educational license?

In case you are a teacher in an educational institution, and you want to use Aseprite in your classroom, you can request a special license for educational purposes.

If Aseprite source code is available, how is that you are selling it?

Aseprite started being open source since its very beginning in 2001, and we were happy with that until August 2016. Now you can still download its source code, compile it, and use it for your personal purposes. You can make commercial art/assets with it too. The only restriction in Aseprite EULA is that you cannot redistribute Aseprite to third parties.

Can I redistribute Aseprite?

No. From August 2016 you cannot redistribute compiled versions of Aseprite. We have replaced the General Public License (GPLv2) with the new Aseprite EULA. The only way to redistribute Aseprite is with an special educational license.

Anyway this does not restrict most users: You can still compile the source code, and use the program to create your assets for commercial games. You can also make contributions to Aseprite or modify its source code for your personal purposes.

Can I sell graphics created with Aseprite?

Yes, you can use your own creations (sprites, animations, graphics, assets, etc.) in any product (personal or commercial) you want. Even with compiled versions of Aseprite you can create art for your personal/commercial purposes.

Editing

How do I zoom?

Using keys 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 (those above the QWERTY keys), or the mouse wheel. You can use the zoom tool too (Z key) to zoom-in with left click and zoom-out with right click.

How do I scroll?

You can press the mouse wheel (middle mouse button), or hold the Space bar and drag & drop with the left mouse button.

Also you can scroll one pixel pressing Space bar+arrow keys or one tile with Shift+Space bar+arrow keys.

How do I rotate the selection?

See Selection tools page.

Move layers in the stack

You have to use the Timeline. To open it you can press the Tab key or View > Timeline menu. Then you can click a layer and drag-and-drop the outline marker. See more information in the Timeline documentation.

Flip selection horizontally or vertically

See Flip section.

Is there a SNES color palette?

No. Because the Super NES could be configured to display 256 simultaneous values from the 15-bit RGB color spectrum (per layer). From Wikipedia:

The Picture Processing Unit (PPU) used in the Super NES has a 15-bit RGB (32,768 color) palette, with up to 256 simultaneous colors at once.

However, while the hardware palette can only contain 256 entries, in most display modes the graphics are arranged into between 2 and 4 layers, and these layers can be combined using additive or subtractive color blending. Because these blended colors are calculated by the hardware itself, and do not have to be represented by any of the existing palette entries, the actual number of visible colors onscreen at any one time can be much higher.

The exact number depends on the number of layers, and the combination of colors used by these layers, as well as what blending mode and graphical effects are in use. In theory it can show the entire 32,768 colors, but in practice this is rarely the case for reasons such as memory use. Most games use 256-color mode, with 15-color palettes assigned to 8x8 pixel areas of the background.

Files

Export a .gif to a sequence of .png files

You can open the .gif with File > Open and then select File > Save choosing a file name like frame00.png. When the operation is completed, you will get a sequence of files like frame00.png, frame01.png, frame02.png, etc.

Is there any difference between .ase and .aseprite files?

No. It's the same difference between .jpg and .jpeg. Both extensions can be used to save the full sprite information (layers + frames). The .aseprite alternative is given because Photoshop uses .ase extension for Adobe Swatches Exchange files.

Why do the colors change when exporting a sprite to a .gif file?

GIF files support only 256 colors. So if you are exporting a RGB sprite with more than 256 colors, or any kind of sprite with several layers with different blending modes, blurred areas, or special effects like glows, you will have problems exporting the image to GIF files. As a general rule: if you are going to export to GIF, you should use less than 256 colors on RGB sprites, or use Indexed sprites directly.

More Details: The GIF format supports 256 new colors on each frame. It means, each frame (a rectangular area) cannot introduce more than 256 new colors to the image (and the previous colors in the rectangular area are lost). Aseprite tries to use this knowledge to calculate the minimal rectangular area between two consecutive frames and then calculate what colors should be introduced in the frame, anyway generally it's really hard to use more than 256 colors. Here's some example of these special GIF with more than 256 colors: https://imgur.com/gallery/VTJu5T0

See also:

Configuration

Why do I see double-sized pixels?

Each Aseprite pixel uses 2x2 real pixels on the screen. It is designed in this way to reproduce look & feel of old sprite editors, and it is achieved only using this special configuration of pixels on the screen.

Anyway, sometimes you need to edit images with the full screen resolution. You can do so going to Edit > Options, and selecting 1:1 in Screen Scale field. You will need to restart the program after this change.

Windows Specific

Is Aseprite for Windows USB portable?

The program works in both ways, depending if the configurations file aseprite.ini exists in the same folder where aseprite.exe is located.

From Aseprite v1.0.2 the configuration is saved in the current user settings folder by default (i.e. %AppData%/Aseprite/aseprite.ini). Anyway, if you copy your aseprite.ini in the aseprite.exe folder, Aseprite detects that you want to carry your configuration with you, so the program acts like a portable app.

Anyway we distribute both versions:

  1. A .exe installer which associates .ase/.aseprite files with Aseprite.exe, and
  2. a portable .zip version that you can uncompress in any folder.

I have a lag using my pen, is there any solution?

If you are having problems with your Wacom pen or tablet, you can try the following solutions:

Other possible solution is to turn up the double click speed on Windows and Wacom settings. (And could be a good idea to turn down the area in which double clicks are registered.)

Does the installer support a silent installation?

As the installer is based on an InnoSetup installer, so you can use the flags of InnoSetup like /SILENT or /VERYSILENT.

More information in: https://jrsoftware.org/ishelp/index.php?topic=setupcmdline

macOS Specific

Does Aseprite run on Apple Silicon?

Yes, it does. Our app bundle includes an universal binary that runs on Intel-based and Apple Silicon Macs natively (if you see -arm64 in the Aseprite title bar, it means that it's running the Apple Silicon version for M1 and M2 chips).

Linux Specific

I cannot resize or maximize the window on Linux, why?

This is a recurrent problem of Linux users. The precompiled Linux distribution of Aseprite (which is not officially supported by our team) is linked to a shared version of Allegro 4 library.

We've fixed this problem years ago distributing a patched version of Allegro 4 along with Aseprite source code. The problems is that we didn't find enough time to merge those patches upstream, i.e. official Allegro 4 library doesn't contain our patches to resize the window.

The conclusion is that if you want to resize the window, you should compile Aseprite by yourself, which is the best advice we can give you. It's not too hard if you follow our instructions. (Almost all dependencies are included in the GitHub repository.)

Is there an official package for Linux?

We are releasing packages for Ubuntu (x86 and x64) at this moment. Fedora is being considered for a near future.

Steam Specific

How do I run Aseprite standalone without Steam?

Aseprite is completely DRM-free, anyway, using the default Steam option to create a desktop shortcut you will notice that it opens Steam to launch Aseprite. Regardless of this behavior, you can create your own direct shortcut to the Aseprite executable file to start Aseprite without Steam.

More information.

About Itself

How do I update my current version?

If you don't remember where you got Aseprite, you can try to:

  • Login to the Humble Bundle Purchases using your email address and search for "Aseprite" there
  • Use the following itch.io form to get links to download all your purchases from itch.io via email (including Aseprite if it's the case)

If you have an user in Humble Bundle, itch.io, or Gumroad, you can get it directly from your library on each case:

  • Humble Bundle Library, press Ctrl+R (or ⌘R on macOS) there to refresh the library and see the latest version of Aseprite
  • itch.io
  • Gumroad
  • If you are using Aseprite on Steam updates are installed automatically by default.

You can always contact us if you have any issue downloading the update. We can resend you the receipt with your download link.

How do you pronounce Aseprite?

See this page.

Aseprite icon looks familiar, where do I know it from?

It's a little tribute to what we think is the greatest game of all time: Super Mario World. It specifically refers to one of the few animated blocks in this game: the rotating block.

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