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!

I made myself a small devil. It was fun!

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

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.

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.

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.

ok..

Nice sprite!

Yes, I was thinking of adding an undo command.

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

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?

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.

for some reason save doesn't work !!!

it works now .. I forgot to add .bmp

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