Atlased

2D indie games may look extremely simple, but there's still a lot of work and effort that goes into making them. One of the most popular graphic elements for 2D games is the sprite. In short, sprites are two-dimensional images or animations overlaid into a scene.

Despite their relatively small size, 2D games still need to be optimized, and GPU usage is still very much an important aspect.

Sprites can be grouped into sheets or atlases (also called sprite batching and texture batching). This simplifies version control, potential team cooperation, file exchange, and most importantly it brings down the GPU workload.

Atlased is a surprisingly capable and flexible sprite sheet and atlas editor. It provides developers with a series of useful tools for creating both atlas textures (via sprite packing) and all the required markup work.

Its main goal? - To allow provide developers with a user-friendly atlas markup and sprite packing tool that can be used on multiple platforms, and that is compatible with as many programming languages and engines as possible.

Atlased is by no means a complex and all-encompassing 2D game development tool. It's part Atlas markup editor, part sprite packer, and part sprite slicer.

This means that, with its help, you can be used to create and change regions within existing files, you can create new images from a set of sprites and create new regions, and you can deconstruct already existing sprites into separate images. That's all.

In terms of sprite packing, Atlased allows you to mash together separate sprites producing a PNG+JSON file combo. It detects sprites within a sprite sheet automatically allowing you to create a JSON markup, and it allows you to create and edit atlases manually (you can set regions, grids, origin points, etc.)

Another great aspect of Atlased is the fact that it allows you to fully configure its export paths, behavior, and color parameters. Last but not least, you can slice sprites (export from atlas to separate sprites), as well as export to Tiled editor tilesets.

We mentioned before that Atlased is a versatile tool. This is partly thanks to the fact that the app is desgined around formats such as PNG and JSON (which are very common). The app supports Godot engine, Unity, Unreal Engine 4, Construct 3, Game Maker Studio, and Defold.

By now, it should be quite clear what Atlased is and isn't. The app is not a texture editing tool, nor is it an animation editor, and by no means is it a graphics or pixel art editor.

Atlased is a simple yet very well-designed sprite sheet and atlas editor, and not much more. It's very easy to use, it comes backed up with very hefty documentation, it's lightweight and easy on resources, and it supports various important game engines.