The Linux gamedev toolkit on a budget.

Godot is the golden standard for open source game engines, and game engines as a whole! It is laser-focused on game development, custom built for them even. It's intuitive, lightweight, gets out of the way, and it makes development fun!

VSCodium is a great alternative to Visual Studio for programming in all types of languages. I generally stick to Godot's built-in scripting interface, but this is a great extra to have around.

The darling superstar of the open source world, blender is a display of how FOSS can go really well. It's a full 3D suite for creating all sorts of 3D assets from start to finish, more and more capable with every passing month!

A great side-dish for blender, material maker can help you create complex procedural materials a la substance designer.

The free alternative to Aseprite. It has the important features you need to get by. Aseprite is definitely worth the money, but to keep things free this is a fantastic tool!

Krita is an excellent painting and image editing program. I am not all too familiar with the requirements for raster-based 2D assets for 2D games, but Krita fulfills my admittedly less demanding needs.

The FOSS vector editor by excellence, Inkscape lets me create UI elements that scale to fit my game scenes seamlessly.

This helps me record easily and allows me to add effects and make edits. I use it a lot to do Foley sound effect work.

Admittedly this is not the tool I am most familiar with, and it may not be the best, but for FOSS music production this is a solid pick!

You know git, don't you? It's the de-facto version control system used by all sorts of software projects all over the world! If it ain't broke...

My projects are done solo or with a very small team, so I feel no need to host my code on GitHub and risk it getting leaked or used to train some bogus corporate AI model. Gitea can be self-hosted and a small team accessing my instance will barely make a difference in my monthly bandwidth use.

A sleek and beautiful git GUI for Linux. It's simple, but simple is all I need, baby!

This is somewhat of an all-in-one productivity app. It allows an individual or team to view tasks through kanban boards, Gantt charts and others to keep a closer eye on what needs to be done.

Tiddlywiki is a lesser used but still handy tool to keep a central single-source-of-truth game design document everyone can reference.

This is a decent alternative to substance painter. It's not as feature rich and the pre-compiled binaries are paid, but you can build it yourself for free and it integrates with blender well.

This is a much fancier music production program that I found easier to maneuver around. It's paid but well worth the money.

This is more feature-rich than Libresprite, well worth the cost if you are delving deeper into pixel art.