[triplefox]

I'm going to speak in terms of techniques rather than tools. These are the best/fastest techniques I've found:

1. Procedural generation in your own code. People forget about this option because classical 2D games were too processing/memory-constrained to allow for anything but tiles loaded direct from ROM, but it's really great for environments. It works out to be very fast to produce because you can iterate and randomize and come up with a lot of variations without extra work, but you have to know what you're going for first. The download size savings is a bonus too.

2. Characters are cheapest to do with 3D only because of animation time. If you don't have a lot of anims, hand-drawn tends to give a more lively result, especially in low-res pixel art styles, but even then, painting over 3D will reduce your error rate. Invest in a Wacom if you want to get serious about drawing on computers, but start with the smallest size: you rarely need more.

3. When I need a clean cartoony look I drag out Inkscape and do a vector trace over the image I'm working with. This can take quite a while, but the results are really good when you go all-out and use two vectors per outline to give them variable width.

[SingAlong]

Thanks!

I was looking at Wascom as soon as arubin suggested me to do so, found address of local stores from their website.