LDtk (short for Level Designer toolkit, formerly called LEd) is a free and open-source 2D level editor for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms, developed by deepnight (Sébastien Bénard) from France, who are the former director of the well-known indie game Dead Cells, with 20+ years of experience for creating various games.
LDtk started out as just a key part of Sébastien Bénard's personal game development plan, which aims to be a modern, efficient and above all user-friendly level editor for all kinds of 2D games for his own use, and for his future projects. Along the way, a passionate community of level designers, aspiring game developers, and technology enthusiasts gathered around the project, providing incredible support and lots of valuable feedback.
As a professional 2D level editor, LDtk has a very user-friendly interface, and offers all the important core features. Even better, it also offers a super simple export option. After enabling this feature, you will have access to additional features: one PNG per layer in each level; a composite PNG per level (i.e.: all layers merged together); a very simple, straightforward and optional JSON file per level, if you want to access your Entities data or other information.
Key Features
| Feature | Description |
| Easy to use | Every UI details were carefully designed to make the process of creating levels as smooth as possible. |
| Super Simple Export | For every new tool out there, there is this moment when you need to write the importer for your fav engine. I've been there too: so LDtk offers a Super Simple Export option. And by "simple", I mean it. |
| 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. |
Fan Made Demo Videos
System Requirements
- Haxe compiler: you need an up-to-date and working Haxe install to build LDtk.
- NPM: this package manager is used for various install and packaging scripts. It is packaged with NodeJS.
Related Links
Download URLs
| License | Version | Download | Size |
| Freeware | Latest |  (mir1 | mir2) |
n/a |