Free and open source level editor LDtk 1.0 is out now

LDtk (formerly known as LEd) is a free and open source level editor, developed by Sébastien Benard who previously worked on the successful Dead Cells and also recently Nuclear Blaze.

It's cross-platform too across Linux, macOS and Windows and with it being under the MIT license you can do mostly whatever you want with it. Although supporting the developer if you find it useful would of course be a good thing to do, if you wish to see it continued to be supported. Linux support is still considered "experimental", so perhaps with the source available issues can be found and fixed more easily.

Seems to run fine on Arch Linux.

What's new in 1.0:

• New entity reference system
• Great performance boost for large projects
• Integrated icons and many quality-of-life changes
• New world layers
• User interface reworks

Some of the key points of LDtk include:

• Easy to use - Every UI details were carefully designed to make the process of creating levels as smooth as possible.
• Auto-rendering - Define some simple rules in a visual editor and let LDtk do the boring part of the skinning job for you.
• World editor - Choose your world layout among “Grid-vania”, “linear”, or “free” and reorganize all your levels using plain old simple drag-n-drop.
• Entities - Create your own game entities, with any custom (typed) properties, like “hit points”, a patrol path or an inventory of items.
• Aseprite support - LDtk can load “*.aseprite” files directly, without any whatsoever intermediate PNG conversion. And with live-reloading support, you paint your tiles, save and LDtk updates everything accordingly, including image resizing.
• Side & top-downs - LDtk focuses on these perspectives to make sure the user experience feels just right. Sorry, no isometric here!
• JSON - The app outputs a well documented JSON format that you can easily parse in your favorite game engine.
• Tiled export - Tiled (TMX) optional export to try it out before implementing your own importer.
• Backups - We know bad things can happen. LDtk offers a strong backup system and can even restore unsaved changes if the app crashes. Which shouldn’t happen, but we don’t live in a perfect world.
• Pay what you want! - LDtk can be used for free without any limitation. But if you want to support my work, please consider buying it, or becoming a direct sponsor.
• Optional Haxe API - If you are a Haxe user, you can benefit from a powerful and fully typed Haxe API, generated by macros as you type.

See more on the official site and GitHub.