Pixel Art Advice / Game engine recommendation

Project Help Art/Animation
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First I should start off with saying, I’m somewhat new to this site so apologies in advance for any mistakes.

I’m looking for any advice for people looking to start in pixel art (I have some experience in regular digital art), and what game engines would work good for what I’m going for.

Art wise, I’m looking to do simple, somewhat big sprites with animation (obviously). Characters, items, and huds. Any sort of references, video links, or anything in general giving advice would be greatly appreciated.

Game engine wise (Coding language doesn’t matter). I’m looking for a game engine that works for 2d pixel games, not like rpg maker. Specifically something that works well and runs well for simple low size 2d pixel art games. I’ve heard gamemakerstudio 2 is pretty good for this, but I recently heard they switched to a $10 a month payment thing, so I’d like to know first if that’s even worth it to begin with.

Again, any advice from anyone is greatly appreciated! I have a game idea I’d like to get working on and see through to the end, but that topic is for another time possibly.

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for a good 2d game engine Godot is what i suggest, it might be hard to learn but once you do you can make a mock game in minutes, it uses GDScript as it’s language and is 100% free

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I am also gonna suggest godot since it’s free.
here is a tutorial on how to handle pixle art in godot How to use Pixel Art Sprites in Godot (beginner tutorial) 🖌 - YouTube that channel is pretty good for tutorials, KidsCanCode and HeartBeast also have some good stuff

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Thank ya both! I’ve messed with Godot before in the past, just never knew if it was exactly good for 2d pixel games, I’ll definitely try to work with it again, and thank you for the videos! I appreciate it all.

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it is probably one of the best open engines for 2d games, you do need to watch window size and scaling or you get squashed pixels if the math doesn’t add up, other than that it is usable for anything

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So, if you wanna see the best of the best’s work up close, there probably isn’t a better place than The Spriter’s Resource. It’s a repository of sprites ripped from games across genre and time. At least a decade old at this point. I’m not really all that skilled as artists go, but everything that I have learned is based on taking sprite sheets from this site, and messing with them.

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Aseprite is probably the best I can think of for making sprites and sprite-sheets, and it’s very easy and satisfying to use. Aseprite v1.3 Trailer - YouTube

It’s not free, but its not expensive either, it doesn’t charge you every month and there is a trial that lets you see how it works. I know I brought this up in another thread, but this software really resonated with me.

As for the engine, I dunno. You could just use the original Game maker studio, they might still sell that somewhere.

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Gamemaker is pretty easy to get into and is for 2D, I think games like Celeste are made with it iirc

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Gamemaker 2 seems to be a set price if you buy it from steam (with no mention of a subscription) and they split it up into different development enviroments: Desktop, Mobile & HTML5 Bundle on Steam

I don’t know what the point of doing this was, aside for squeezing developers for cash, but if you only want to work with desktop games, it might be worth it.

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