I personally started making my games in Godot!
but obviously making games takes more then just a game engine.
For my Pixel art i use Pixelstudio. Asprite is better in my opinion but there are a few certain things in Pixelstudio that just integrated into my workflow over the like almost 8 years i’ve been making games for.
I can also really recommend Notion for planning out games and create design documents! i recently started using it and it’s really been great!