Software with Scripting

Aseprite is a pixel art editor built around sprite work: an indexed-color workflow, onion skinning and a timeline for animation, tilemap layers, custom brushes, and export straight to sprite sheets. Extensions and Lua scripts add anything it lacks. It is the editor most Lospec artists reach for first.

Blender is the free 3D suite, and it turns up constantly in low-spec work: modelling and texturing low-poly assets, rendering 3D scenes down to a pixel-art sprite sheet, and building the turnarounds that hand-pixelled animation is traced from. Its add-on ecosystem covers most of the rest.

Defold is a small, free 2D engine that builds unusually light games for desktop, web, mobile and consoles from one project. It is scripted in Lua, ships as a single editor with no licence tiers, and its tilemap and sprite handling suit pixel art directly.

LibreSprite continues the last GPL version of Aseprite as a community project. It keeps the familiar layers, animation timeline and palette tools, and adds its own scripting and a browser build.

Phaser is the most used JavaScript framework for 2D games in the browser. It covers sprites, tilemaps, physics, input, audio and scene management, has a very large body of examples and tutorials behind it, and runs anywhere a browser does.

Picotron is a fantasy workstation from the makers of PICO-8: a small imaginary computer with its own desktop, file system and built-in tools - a sprite editor, a map editor, a tracker and a code editor - all inside fixed limits. It is roomier than PICO-8 and keeps the same deliberately constrained feel.

PuzzleScript is a browser engine where an entire puzzle game is a short text file: a legend of characters, a set of rewrite rules, and the levels drawn as ASCII. Games run and share as a single link, which has made it the usual home for small tile-based puzzle experiments.

Unity is a general-purpose game engine with a well-worn 2D pipeline: a sprite editor and atlas packer, a tilemap system with rule tiles, 2D lights and shadows, and a large asset store. It is heavier than the dedicated 2D engines, and in return it goes anywhere.