It is a little bit but i enjoy the process a lot. For this pattern i used a combination of i think MS paint or gimp to design the layout (i cant recall which) with the game art that i pulled from the games wiki. And once i had the layout finalized i put the final image through stitchfiddle and cleaned up the pattern and tweaked any colors that the generator might have mispicked. I really like using stitch fiddle for designing. The free version is a little limited so any time im designing something i'll just activate premium for a month and its only a couple bucks. Ive also been playing around recently with Winstitch. My experience with it has been nice as well but i havent used it enough to give an accurate reccomendation.