SpriteMancer

I was working through hand-drawing a series of sprites for a video game I'm working on when I thankfully came across this gem. I was a bit hesitant due to some of the lower reviews, but it's extremely easy and intuitive to use, and the effects have been gorgeous. You can make a wide variety of VFX (specifically, I'm making various explosions, smoke, blood, fire, and other effects for a card game). I couldn't be happier with it and have already put 10 hours into making effects today immediately after downloading. I did come across a very minor bug or two, but nothing major. A really nice quality-of-life update would be tooltips on hover for every input field. It takes some playing around to figure out a few of them, so tooltips on everything would be a great help. I've built particle systems myself, so I'm fairly familiar with the terminology and such, but there are a few settings that aren't totally clear, and I can imagine non-devs might struggle with some of them. I do end up using other tools for various color corrections, scaling, compression, etc., so you probably shouldn't expect to get absolutely everything for your sprite sheets in this one app. It seems to focus on beautiful sprite VFX - and it does that really well, in my opinion. Anyway, I'm loving it and really appreciate the extremely minimal and clean UI as well. I'm actually surprised by how quickly you can create gorgeous and unique effects. If you need high-quality VFX sprites for your game this is an absolute must-have!