Useful Tools and Websites for making fangames

[patrickgh3]

I hope this list is useful to newcomers and veterans alike.
Modified 5/31/16.

Graphics:
Spriters Resource: Graphics ripped from various commercial games. Find animated sprites, tilesets, and more here!
Paint.NET: A nice all-around editor for Windows. Less powerful but much more user-friendly than GIMP.
Aseprite: Great pixel art-focused editor with a palette and animation frames. Great for making tilesets and sprites from scratch.
See also: Pixel Prospector's list of tools and royalty-free graphics

Sounds and Music:
Sounds Resource: Sounds ripped from various commercial games.
Freesound: A bunch of real-world sounds people have recorded.
Audacity: All-purpose audio editing tool. Useful for changing music volumes and tweaking sounds, and converting between formats.
There are lots of ways to obtain music: youtube downloader sites, video game remix sites, soundcloud, and many more you can find through googling.
See also: Video Game Caster's list of royalty-free music and sounds

Other:
Jtool and RMJ: Useful for testing out jumps without having to compile your whole game, and also for designing entire needle screens.
map2gm: Eliminates having to copy objects over manually into Gamemaker if you use RMJ or Jtool to make needle screens.
Crystalline: An essential tool for working with Gamemaker particles. Particles are a great way to add flair to your game!
See also: the tools board has a few more fangame-specific tools.

[Derf]

Really neat little list!

This is a really neat little program for rotating sprites accurately without anti-aliasing + it's also good for scaling. Beats the same features on GM's inbuilt sprite editor by miles and while I think photoshop's scaling for pixel stuff is pretty good, I prefer RotSprite's rotation. I'm not sure how useful this will be for other people since I make all my graphics myself and that's where I get the most use out of this, if you're not doing that I doubt you'll find this that useful. None the less it makes nice 45 degree spikes etc, and if you're anal about graphics that 'precision' is something you can't live without.