Program to make a sprite from smaller parts

A while ago, I found Spriter (http://www.brashmonkey.com/) which lets you make a sprite by animating smaller images together. I really liked that idea, as all of my sprites work this way, and my main character especially will have dozens of animations made like this. However, Spriter doesn't seem to be made for the resolution I'm using - the main character's sprites are mostly 16x24.

What I'm wondering is a) can Spriter be used for 16-bit-style low-res sprites, or b) is there another way that will work better for me? I'm currently using Paint.net layers, and it is a huge pain to make changes to sprite parts and update them in every sprite.

You need to import the sprites into spriter already at the resolution you want them at. Don't import them then resize, etc... as that tends to not give the best results. If the pieces are already 16x24 you should be fine when you bring them into spriter.

Hmm, seems I need to give Spriter another try.

So, my question is how do you work with pixel precision? Everything here is set up for "smooth animations", where you're not supposed to see individual pixels. How do I snap objects to the right pixel positions? Or is this even possible?

Edit: On a related note, is it possible to not blur the sprites when I zoom in? Because I don't want my sprites to be tiny when I'm trying to get the placements right.

Edit 2: This nonsense is why I'm still not sure Spriter is the right tool for me:

The sprite is blurred, and there is no snap-to-grid that I can see anywhere.

Honestly I don't think Spriter is the way to go here, and there's several reasons for that.

One, small size images do not look the same rotated.

Two, Spriter's not made for non sub-pixel placement.

Three, you're not really saving a lot of space, as a frame by frame animation(what you should be using) wouldn't really be that expensive... within reason of course.

The reason I want something like spriter is so that I can a) easily put together new sprites from a set of smaller parts, and b) update the design of these parts without a ton of effort in updating every single resulting sprite.

Right now, I'm considering re-coloring the entire character to a new 8-color palette for better contrast, but that will require recoloring every "part", and then updating that part in every single Paint.NET image for several dozen frames of animation.

Like I said, small size images of that size, and smaller do not rotate well, or at least come out looking close to the same using the usual interpolation techniques. You're at the pixel level, and those don't turn.

The only method I'm afraid is to manually draw something that resembles what you want.

That's too bad. Looks like I've got a lot of work ahead of me.

(Note that I never wanted to use Spriter to rotate those images - I was gonna draw separate sprites for each rotation).

That's why making games is hard, — Your solution was pretty creative, but also lazy as your game involves pixel art, which does not work in the way you'd like it to. I wish it worked, though, it would also save me a lot of time

This game is already taking massive amounts of effort on my part - it's a very ambitious project. Can you blame me for trying to find a shortcut?

Ah, well. At least making animations is fun.