Quote: "What do you use to make the ships?"
There are a few choices. You can use paint, which is alright. Photoshop can be confusing to use for 2D (this is my own experience, by the way). Paintshop Pro... dont even go there lol ^.^ but the one that I like to use is called iDraw. It's got everything, grid, frames, "Snap to" function, even a select sprite function (it reads what the background/transparent colour is and it'll select the sprite which does not have that colour.
So I recommend iDraw. I'd post the website to it, but I'm not sure if thats allowed, so I'll upload it later.
It's freeware btw.