ShoeBox: The Free Swiss-Army Knife for Sprites and Game Art

If you make games or UI, you know the grind: packing sprites into an atlas, slicing a sheet back into frames, generating a bitmap font, cutting sprites out of a screenshot. ShoeBox by renderhjs rolls all of that into one free, drag-and-drop app — and it’s been a quiet staple of game-dev toolchains for years.

What it is

ShoeBox is a free Adobe AIR app for Windows and macOS packed with game- and UI-related tools. Every tool works through a simple drag-and-drop or clipboard interaction: drop a file onto a tool, or copy an image/text and click. That’s the whole workflow — fast, tactile, no project setup.

It plays nicely with the engines and frameworks you already use: Unity, Starling, Sparrow, Cocos2D, NGUI, pixi.js, HTML5, Corona, andEngine, and more.

The tools that matter most

• Pack Sprites — pack many images, animated SWF, or GIFs into a single texture atlas.
• Read Sprites — export each individual sprite from a sheet or bitmap font (needs the image plus a lookup file).
• Bitmap Font — generate a bitmap font, designed in Photoshop, compatible with the AngelCode .fnt format.
• Extract Sprites — detect sprites in a transparent image and cut them out automatically.
• Extract Tiles — pull a tile map and tile bank out of a game screenshot.
• Split PSD — split Photoshop layers into individual PNG files.
• Texture Ripper — extract rectangular textures from photos or screenshots.
• Ani Frames / Frame Sheet — turn a GIF, SWF, or PNG sequence into a frame-by-frame animation or a single animation sheet.
• Sprite Pivots — edit registration points (pivots) for many sprites at once.
• Slice 9 — create and read 9-patch (slice-9) sets for scalable UI.
• Mask Image — mask and feather an image into a complex composition from the clipboard.

Each tool is configurable: right-click a tool and pick a template to match your engine’s expected output.

Installing it

ShoeBox runs on Adobe AIR, so:

1. Install the Adobe AIR runtime.
2. Uninstall any version before 3.6.3 first (a certificate was renewed in newer builds).
3. Install the ShoeBox.air file.

Who it’s for

Indie devs, technical artists, and anyone shipping 2D content will get the most out of it. ShoeBox won’t replace your art tool — it replaces the tedious in-between steps that usually eat your afternoon.

Great tools don’t do the creative work for you; they delete the busywork around it. ShoeBox is a textbook example.

Grab it from renderhjs’ ShoeBox page.