what program should i use for my forum adventure

photopea should work just fine, though for something more complex where you want to keep and reuse assets/sprites you make having a program actually downloaded would probably be easier? not sure 100% on that one.

But in general any program that lets you use a really nice crunchy hard pixel zero alias brush works just fine. which is why i would NOT recommend procreate due to how it handles brushes. there are pixel brushes you can get but you cant really modify them in any way without procreate blurring the hell outta them (note: i stopped using procreate a couple years ago bc of this + other smaller reasons its possible that its been fixed but i havent heard anything on it)

but a lot of my older hs stuff was done in sai v1 (which i feel weirdly obligated to say Isnt Actually Free it just has zero copy protection and anyone who likes the program maybe consider throwing the guy some yen and upgrade to sai 2) while a lot of my newer stuff is in clip studio paint. I jump between older and newer versions based on if im using my ipad or desktop but for something like this any version would do and it goes on sale often.

If you're using either Windows, Mac, or Linux, you can use FireAlpaca, it's freeware (ad related to the program at startup) and fairly simple to use. It's the first art program I've used and i still use it to this day since it works well enough for my needs. It works well enough for Homestuck stuff speaking from experience here so i recommend it highly if you don't have much experience with art programs, the only real issue is the "animation" feature basically just hijacks the layering system instead of featuring a standard animation timeline. Which causes performance issues if you're animating with a lot of layers of art as you have to duplicate that for each frame of animation. (It's weird, you have to put everything needed for a single frame in a folder, and if you just want to move one thing for the next frame, you have to duplicate that whole folder to make a new frame.) which isn't great but it's good enough to export to a gif then to put into ezgif and manually change the timings from there.

https://firealpaca.com/download/

If you're on Android or IOS... I salute you soldier for the battles ahead, every program there sucks. Medibang does have a free android and IOS version though (Medibang is basically just FireAlpaca with less features and cloud saving if you pay for the subscription for it. It's weird that there's basically two very similar programs being sold by this company, both of them with very similar free versions too.) But you have to watch ads if you want to do super complicated things like saving to a folder Android allows you to access outside of the app. If you're on Android specifically i found LayerPaint Zero to work, if a bit clunky, but i had to download an APK for that since it's no longer on Google Play and is no longer supported, but it doesn't have ads and it supports the same exact file format as FireAlpaca and Medibang (mdp) so you can transfer your art between devices while keeping your layers. (Without having to deal with PSD's, PSD is "supported" by all the programs i've mentioned, but PSD is not an open format so bugs tend to happen if you use more complicated features as Adobe doesn't release the specifications for the format, so devs have to basically make educated guesses on how it works.)

ive only got experience with windows and android but for windows i like krita (free) and if youre on mobile i use ibisPaint with a pro subscription but you dont really need pro

i like those two because you can custom make pens pretty easily for free with built in tools so i just made a pixel brush and i used that when i was briefly trying to do a fanadventure on tumblr lol

i think i like krita the best

I uSE KLEKI AND MANIuPLATE THE PHOTOS TO MAKE FRAMES, THEN EXPORT IT TO A VIDEO SOFTWARE TO MAKE GIFS. ITS A TAD TEDIOuS BuT IT GIVE ME A RESuLT I QuITE LIKE.

just made a chet sprite for speciesquest