Software with Engine Export

Simple Pixel Art Editor is a free pixel art editor that runs in the browser, with no install or account needed. It covers sprite drawing with layers, mirror drawing and selections, frame-by-frame animation with onion skin and frame tags, and exports to PNG, GIF and sprite sheets.

It also includes tools for game assets: a tileset editor that generates Wang-16 and blob-47 auto-tile terrains from a base tile and exports Godot 4 TileSet (.tres) and Tiled (.tsx) files, a tilemap painter with an isometric mode, a palette library and an image-to-pixel-art converter.

It suits beginners and hobbyists making sprites and tilesets for small 2D games. The source code is MIT-licensed.

LDtk is a level editor with auto-tiling rules, entity definitions and a clean JSON format with loaders for most engines.

Tiled is a flexible tilemap editor supporting orthogonal, isometric and hexagonal maps, with importers for most engines.

DragonBones was one of the first 2D skeletal animation tools, and for years the free alternative to Spine, with runtimes for the major engines and an export format several of them read directly. Development stopped some years ago, but the editor still runs and the runtimes are still around.

Spine animates 2D artwork by rigging it to a skeleton rather than drawing every frame, and ships runtimes for most engines so the animation plays back as bones rather than as a sprite sheet. Used with pixel art it needs care - rotation and scaling fight the pixel grid - but for characters with a lot of motion it is far less work than hand-pixelling each frame.