Complementary software for 2D game development?

Draw and model: OpenSource, Free or Afordable Price: GIMP, Inkscape, PixelEdit, Aseprite, Blender. Comercial or High prices: Adobe Photoshop, Ilustrator, Maya, 3DStudio.

Sound: OpenSource, Free or Afordable Price: Audacity, Reaper. Comercial or High prices: Cubase, FLStudio, Adobe Audition.

Animation and creating levels:

OpenSource, Free and nice: Godot engine.

I would include Spriter(animation), Clip Studio Paint(art), Krita(art), and Tiled(maps) as something worth looking into.

What about Piskel? It's open-source as well.

I create my sprites and hand-animate them when necessary in Krita, and any tweening is done in Godot itself. Krita actually has some built-in animation features, though it's pretty bare bones. I'd say Krita is your absolute #1 choice for FOSS (free open-source software) drawing and painting, I use it both for high resolution sprites and pixel art, it can handle both easily, not to mention for concept art and illustrations and logos and any other graphical need I have. It's as close as you'll get to Photoshop or Clip Studio Paint (Manga Studio) for F R E E

I wouldn't recommend Spriter or any other external animation software unless there's some really tight integration with Godot itself, otherwise there's no point as Godot's animation features are advanced enough to do most anything you want in there. I say this because, even if a given piece of animation software can mesh warp sprites (as Godot cannot), if Godot doesn't know what to do with that functionality then you have to export to a sprite sheet, which IMO defeats the purpose of tween animation since you wind up with massive sprite sheets depending on how smooth the animation is, which is completely unworkable if your resolution and/or your characters are large enough; in other words it's limiting, and it's inefficient, dramatically increasing your game's file size and the amount of RAM a computer needs to have to run the game at all. I faced a similar problem with Unity3D and Toon Boom Harmony, where despite them advertising that Harmony had integration with Unity3D, this was in fact non-functional and all you could really do is export a sprite sheet with all of your frames of animation on it. I was supposed to save on space by having just the symbols on a sprite sheet and the animation data ported over, much like you'd expect with 3D modeling software, but alas. On the flip side, pixel art doesn't need these advanced features anyway, so it's total overkill for that purpose. Just about anything can produce pixel art, and that can be reasonably placed onto a sprite sheet without worry of using too much memory due to the pixel sprites being so small. What is left for animation software? I'd rather go without. You can get reasonably attractive and efficient sprites using the cut-out method and swapping out key parts of each cut-out with other sprites in a sprite sheet when need be, a combination of hand-drawn and tweening.

I completely denounce GIMP for art, it's a terrible piece of software IMO and will continue to be so until they give it a major UI overhaul and give it some more artist-friendly features. It doesn't even work with a tablet out of the box, what kind of image editing program makes you configure your tablet to work with it? Literally everything out there works with a tablet with no configuration necessary but no, GIMP has to be difficult. Not to mention I can't seem to go 30 minutes with it before the UI locks up somehow and I can't select anything until I restart it. Wanna change your brush size with shortcuts? Well you can do it one pixel at a time, or you can do it ten pixels at a time, there is no inbetween. What, you want your tablet to work fine with that, like every single other art program out there? Too bad, one pixel or ten pixels is all you get.

Blender's pretty much the only reasonable choice for 3D modeling, unless you want to pay a gazillion dollars for something proprietary. If you're not a student and you're not a professional, forget about Maya or 3DS Max or Modo or whatever else is trying to sucker you into shelling out a million bazillion dollars for features you probably don't need for game development. Even if you are a student you can't use student licenses for commercial work so better to not get involved all together; student licenses exist just to keep you in their ecosystem, so you learn how to use their software and then don't want to learn any other software out of laziness. Blender isn't perfect tho, but I've used lots of different 3D software and I don't think any of them are, 3D is a really complex and technical art form and I just barely understand the important bits.

For music and SFX, you can probably get by perfectly fine with LMMS; it's FOSS and works very similarly to FL Studio, except without patterns AFAICT, and with a smaller selection of synths but you can always get more via VSTs, of which there are many free ones out there. If you wanna go oldschool and really need that retro chiptune feel and sound, I'd recommend MilkyTracker. Godot supports its filetypes natively, although the last time I tried it, it didn't support it perfectly, so you may need to experiment with that. I'm sure you could always export to MP3 or OGG if you wanted. I wouldn't recommend FL Studio or Ableton or any other paid software unless you're already some kind of competent musician who plans on using such software for something besides games, or you just happen to have a license already.

I feel like it's not really worthwhile to use an external script editor with Godot since the internal one is tightly integrated with the rest of the engine. If you're willing to sacrifice stuff like intellisense, you can pretty much use whatever editor you want; I hear a lot of people recommend Visual Studio Code, and others seem to really like SublimeText.

I like to use Zim to keep track of all my game's notes, but you could also perhaps use OneNote, but that's only "free"--I think you need to sign up for an account with that, which just rubs me the wrong way. Zim saves things in plain text so it's a simple matter to edit its contents without the software, but stuff like OneNote has a proprietary format which can only be edited with OneNote, which can be limiting. For example, I like to use whatever text editor I want on my mobile device to edit my notes on the go--after all, it's plain text, so there's no problem. However, when I used OneNote, I used the version which didn't require an account on desktop. On mobile, there is no such version: if you don't have a microsoft account, you cannot use the mobile OneNote app. So I wound up having to keep my mobile notes and my desktop notes separate, which was a little annoying. I couldn't read my notes on the go, so I was pretty much just limited to jotting down ideas until I got back home. Now I no longer have this problem, thankfully.

I don't really use anything else with Godot since Godot handles a lot of stuff already. It has tilemaps built in, so I don't need any external tile editors like Tiled. It even supports isometric tilemaps, and there are examples of how that looks in their example projects. It is sufficient to build levels in Godot. You could also build 3D levels in Blender and with the right tags, import that with collisions into Godot, if you never wanted to make levels in Godot. I suppose that all depends on your personal tastes.

As far as I am able to discern this is the best game dev software you can get for a zero dollar price tag: Krita for 2D graphics, Blender for 3D graphics, LMMS for audio, and of course Godot to put it all together. This is sufficient for doing just about anything you want, everything else depends on your ability as a developer.

P-Star7:

My avatar was made in piskel :#

Somnivore:

GIMP have fix all the isues with Wacom tablets yet, please try this. Shortcuts for brush size continue hidden, but there are. but I´m agree that krita is more friendly to paint,to other tecnical things no, GIMP and Inkscape have a very fluid workflow, with objects from inkscape (that you can name in xml editor) being path´s in GIMP and a lot of other things. Krita have some types of integrations to, ej: you can have same palettes in the 3 programs.

For the design and notes you can do a plugin for godot that handles text or csv archives in disk and display/edit that in editor. Only look at control nodes a bit. Is very easy.

What tool do you use to design the story? :P

@memer said: What tool do you use to design the story? :P

You mean besides imagination? I would suggest a text document for the "walkthrough" where you say in what order the story events happen, the player goes places, beats bosses and gets items, etc. And if your game is non-linear (unlike Sonic which has only 19 levels and a different ending which depends on whether you got the Chaos Emeralds) use flowchart software (for example, the player makes a decision that leads to different series of events or different level order) (like Cave Story where there are different routes). Flowchart software could also help for Mario-like maps with preplanned routes (unlike an RPG where you walk all over the terrain).

@memer said: What tool do you use to design the story? :P

I just use Zim for everything documentation related. I like to break my plot up into chunks to keep it manageable, though how you would do so is up to your design; for example, if your game is quest-based, you'd want to break it up between quests; if your game is chapter-based, you'd want to break it up by chapter. You'd want to keep some form of overarching plot summary somewhere too (assuming there is one), along with a list of characters and locations. I would also recommend FocusWriter for some quality zenware, really helps you get into t h e z o n e .