I've posted this on the Retro Remakes forum, but I'll post it here as well:

Inspired by Pixel Robots (http://www.davebollinger.com/works/pixelrobots/) and Spore.. I've written an experimental prototype for helping you create sprites!

This is still a very early prototype, but it is designed so that people without any ability to draw can create cool 16 x 16 or bigger sprites. (See my new avatar)

How does it work?

Well, when you start up you will see something like this (NOTE all screenshots are from the old version, new version has more key options!):
http://www.funkemunke.com/rem_1.png

The grey square in the top right is your 16 x 16 canvas. And the 36 blue images are randomly created 16 x 16 images. The lower numbered ones are slightly more likely to have more black pixels in them, and the higher numbers are more likely to have 'lit' blue pixels.

So, when you move the cursor around you will see that a green square moves around the blue images and in the grey square in the top-right. By left clicking we can copy parts of the sprites from the blue images into our canvas. Note: All copying uses horizontal mirroring by default (Press X to turn this off)..

We can change the resolution of our copy 'brush' by pressing 1, 2 or 4, but for now we will leave it at the default 4 pixel size.

Ok, I've started by copying the face from 19..
http://www.funkemunke.com/rem_2.png

Then I copied the ears from 18, legs from 14, arms from 32..
http://www.funkemunke.com/rem_3.png

Now what? We have a sprite, but it's not great and we are now stuck from the images we have. Well, we can press R to reroll new random images, or.. (and this is the good bit!), we can press E to evolve new images based on the one we have on our canvas. Grey areas create more random sections, while white and black pixels influence the new random images more strongly, to create variations of the original canvas parts.

We can evolve as many images as we like, and these all evolve based on our current canvas, allowing us to fine-tune our sprite.

Ok, after evolving from our canvas, I changed part of the lower face and legs from 34..
http://www.funkemunke.com/rem_4.png

I then played around with it for some more minutes following the above procedure and letting the design evolve with what ever I liked. So, after several more iterations and changing the design to something I liked more I came up with this sprite in the canvas:
http://www.funkemunke.com/rem_5.png

This is with the default simple parts copying, no 'drawing' or erasing of single pixels.

Now, I would like to see if people who have no artistic ability can come up with something good, press S when running to save a sprite (bmp/pcx/tga format), and then post the sprites here. That would help me see how well it works and what can be improved some more.

Please have a go with this!
http://www.funkemunke.com/Richard's_Evolving_Sprite_Tool.zip

The latest version included new features:
Now runs in a window
Improved noise reduction in randomisation and evolution routines

Keys:
8 - 8 pixel resolution
L - Load bitmap, bitmaps are shrunk if neccessary (max size is 64 x 64, min size is 16 x 16), all non-black colours are marked as 'white'
B - Evolve only black colours. Useful for working around edges
W - Evolve only white colours. Useful for working on details in a shape
+ - Double size (maximum is 64 x 64)
- - Halve size (minimum is 16 x 16)
X - toggle on/off X symmetry
Y - toggle on/off Y symmetry

Let's see what sprites you come up with then!

Hmm, seems really interesting and useful. I'll try it!

I made myself a small devil. It was fun!

http://img170.imageshack.us/img170/5812/devildk5.png

Well, talk about something extremely useful! Could the next version include 24x24, and 32x32? Impressive, I can make some small sprites but I don't have the patience for animation, even with tools.

And Linux version, please? Oh, and could you add some rest(1) to prevent it using 100% CPU? It is almost unusable under Wine.

It's not saving the sprites on my computer.

Also , it's really hard to edit one or two or four pixels of a sprite at a time. It would be cool to have a zoom feature where you could have one of the possibilities selected and displayed on the left and a zoomed in version of the editing sprite on the right. I also noticed that Y-symmetry was missing from the list on the right. I'd also rather display it in fullscreen because on a 1280X800 monitor stuff is pretty small in a 640X480 window.

Rey: Updated to include rest(1). This version supports 16 x 16, 32 x 32 and 64 x 64. You can use the + and - keys to double/halve the sprite.

Edgar: Download the latest version, the Y text is fixed. Also.. you can press 1, 2, 4, or 8 to alter the copy size. Not sure why it's not saving. It used the default (and crappy) Allegro fileselector, and works for me. Are you adding a .bmp extension?
Oh, I've added a FULLSCREEN binary.

New Sprite from me: Skull Generator style image..

It would be nice if you include a little set of "primitives" i.e: hands, faces, flowers, trees, bodies, etc. So we can evolve those primitives, but starting from a well defined image.
I suggesting this because I find that I don't have any control over the images(and I don't like that!) I don't know, perhaps that was your intention.
Anyway, here is a face slightly retouched with Paint.

Paul, you can load an image and then evolve that, but having proper brushes you can evolve makes things quite a bit more complex.

Ah, yes, it is now quite usable under wine. I don't seem to find where it saves the stuff, though >:-( But that is something about Wine, not your program.

Sorry, I didn't know.

ok..

Very cool tool. However, I would like an undo command. There were a couple times when I changed a portion of my image, but then I liked what I had before more and couldn't change it back since I already evolved the monsters.

Here's what I made:

Nice sprite!

Yes, I was thinking of adding an undo command.

Seems like a usefull tool. For the time being I'm not planning to do anything, what would incorporate retro graphics, but I'll definately keep this on mind.

Cough.. Anyway, it can also be used for inspiration for designs.

RP: you just made my day it's funny how I sometimes write/say something ambiguous. Yep, that's right with that inspiration.

Edit:
By the way, how's the work on Chaos Groove continuing?

Not much at the moment. I will do some more work on it soon.

Anyone have any suggestions or ideas for this sprite creator that would improve it?

I found out why I couldn't save. Two things made it fail , the first was I was trying to save it as a .jpg , the second was that you can't save to a non-existent directory.

I downloaded the latest one and the fullscreen is much easier to work with , thanks.

Here's a few of mine :

I tried to colorize one in MS Paint but all the colors kept coming out in greyscale. What color depth are you saving the files in? Are you using a palette with them? It would be nice if they were in 24 bit color depth. I don't understand why it won't let me colorize it. I tried changing the attributes , but color was already selected in the MS Paint image->attributes.

It saves them as 8-bit images with a greyscale palette. You just need to make it full-colour (easy to do in Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, not sure about Paint).

EDIT: Updated to use a much longer filepath, hopefully that will fix some saving issues.

Well , Paint.Net managed to colorize them for me , still working on the colorized one , but here are some more basic ones , showing the evolution :

An option to completely copy one of the sprites over into the editing sprite would be cool. It would make evolving the sprite go faster.

for some reason save doesn't work !!!

Have you tried the latest one I just posted Ariesnl?

Edgar: Good idea. I will include that.

it works now .. I forgot to add .bmp

Neat! It took me a moment to figure out what's going on (the evolving options take the white item in the top corner and evolve it in different ways to produce the set on the left).

Two things. I noticed changing the zoom can sometimes distort the white template and then you can't get it back to the way you had it before. Second, I suggest putting some kind of outline around where the white template is. Sometimes, I'd start with a crude drawing of what I had in mind and then evolve it into something better. This is hard to do when you can't really tell where the drawing space is.

For MS Paint, just go to Save As...and select 24 bit bitmap. Once it's saved, you should be able to use color.

This thread title gave me a good laugh.

But what if i want sprites like Nintendo's Mario RPG can your program do that????

No, you would need a sprite editor for that. You may eventually get some with this program, but it is quite a lot of work.

That does the trick , thanks.

It's not much , but they're colorized!

That's all well and good, but once you've got your sprites (presumably you're using it largely because you're crap at drawing), how are you going to animate them or given they are symmetrical make them walk left or right

Assign each pixel a symmetrical depth and rotate it 90 degrees left or right and then color it.

I'm using the program because it's fun , regardless of whether or not I can make pretty pixel drawings.

I'm glad people find it fun and useful. Neil:

It maked me an ant! A bee? A beant!

594561

It's hard to see.

Anyways, to answer Neil: You take it into 3ds Max, model it, unwrap it, texture it, rig it, animate it, and render it. 8-bit to 32-bit in about 2 weeks.

Kibiz0r: Looks nice.

Pretty cool!

I don't think it is extremely useful (though it probably has some use), but it's fun to play with either way

He looks better if you zoom in more:
http://www.allegro.cc/files/attachment/594572

O RLY?

I'd like to try it out but I don't use windows.

Yes. Really.

rectfill()?

Hmm

I haven't yet had a chance to try the program, but from reading the blurb, one thing I am wondering is whether creating an animation where each 'evolution' is a frame would show a gradually evolving creature, or just a fast slideshow of creatures.

AE.

It would probably be a bit jerky and chaotic at this sprite resolution.
Is anyone interested in developing this further to include things like proper animation support?

I'm not sure how much time I will have to spend on it..

doom rabbit!

doom rabbit has met his doom...

This feels like DigiMon.