This is my current toolbox for developing Dungeon Fodder and the Chronicles of Juice series. Nothing here is set in stone, as I learn more and new requirements pop up, tools will get swapped in and out. I'll keep this page updated as the stack evolves.
Game Engine
Godot Engine
Free, open-source, brilliant for 2D pixel art, and the community is genuinely one of the best in gamedev.
Art
Igara Studio S.A.
The gold standard for pixel art and sprite animation. Tags, layers, and onion skinning make it dead easy to build out full animation sets per character.
Godot Addons
Behaviour trees and hierarchical state machines in one addon, written in C++, so it barely touches your frame budget. Custom tasks are still plain GDScript, which is the best of both worlds.
Cuts out the busywork of importing sprites into Godot. Point it at your .aseprite files, and it auto-generates SpriteFrames resources with all your tags mapped to animations.
Audio
A massive cloud-based SFX library with drag-and-drop into your DAW or editor. Great for quickly auditioning sounds when you need a sword swing or impact hit that fits.
Free, no-nonsense audio editor for trimming, normalising, and batch-processing sound effects. Not the fanciest tool in the shed, but it gets the job done.
Agentic Coding
An agentic coding assistant that lives in your terminal and almost understands your codebase. Handy for scaffolding scripts, writing custom BT tasks, and rubber-ducking architecture decisions without leaving your workflow.