Sebastien Benard

Sebastien Benard is an independent French developer best known in the game-tooling community for creating LDtk, a streamlined 2-D level editor built expressly for indie teams and solo creators who want to assemble tile-based worlds without the overhead of larger engines. Rooted in the same design philosophy that shaped the cult hit Dead Cells—where Benard served as lead designer—LDtk focuses on immediacy: drag-and-drop tile placement, auto-layer rules that prevent tiling errors, and an open JSON export format that drops straight into Unity, Godot, GameMaker, Haxe, or custom engines. The software supports unlimited layers, entity placeholders, custom enums and tags, real-time error checking, and instant replay of level iterations, making it equally useful for rapid prototyping of a single-screen puzzle or for orchestrating sprawling, interconnected maps for metroidvanias and RPGs. Because projects are saved as human-readable files, version-control systems like Git treat them as plain text, simplifying collaboration between designers, artists, and developers. Lightweight yet extensible, LDtk has become a quiet standard among pixel-art and low-resolution projects that prize speed and clarity over 3-D bells and whistles. The editor is available for free on get.nero.com, delivered through trusted Windows package sources such as winget, always installing the newest build and allowing batch installation alongside other applications.