I'm on the fence for the two, and would like to know which two I should go with. Or are they both different in ways?
I own all of the above, and I end up using them in different ways. I find texture packer and physics editor to be the superior tool if you aren't planning to have visual level design. However, for visual level design and just making things easy with collision detection, joints, etc Level Helper is the way to go. LevelHelper makes stuff a lot simpler, it just doesn't feel quite as powerful for a power user(I haven't figured out how to auto-trace sprites to make physics shapes for example).
If you just use TP/PE you have to design levels non-graphically, or make your own graphical editor. I.E. hard coding elements in each level, creating an XML markup file that can be parsed, or duplicating some of the functionality of LevelHelper that you may need in your own graphical tool.
So, if in the long run, I plan on doing things graphically, will SpriteHelper and LevelHelper be enough for me to work with atlases and physics? Or is PE more fleshed out for physics, and TP more for atlases. I just need to know if Sprite/LevelHelper are enough for the long run
If you're a flash developer Don't know if you're a Flash developer or not, but my partner and I created a tool specifically for getting sprites out of Flash and into Corona (.lua) It's free to use for a month: http://www.loqheart.com/spriteloq Kind of a niche tool, but incredibly useful if you're working on those 2 platforms.
no worries. Like I said, it's a very niche tool. Why type of game are you building? Do you anticipate using a lot of sprites and animations? Are you planning on building a lot of levels? I've only had experience with Texturepacker/Physics editor, and I think it's a pretty versatile tool. There's always limitations, but I'd say go with that and see how you like it.
I think if you go with Tower Defense, you should definitely go with TexturePacker. If you go with Braid/SMB, you should probably have a LevelHelper. Just my opinion though.
I haven't used those tools myself, but I think it's quite similar. Like me, I think he's just a single developer that created these tools himself. Though LevelHelper seems to have more features that would help with level design than just a texturepacker. That's why I said it might be better if you're going with a platformer. The levels in my own game aren't as complicated, so I just layout and design my levels myself.
I went with TexturePacker as I'm working with a graphic designer who does all the game assets. TexturePacker has a command line tool you can use. So I put together a shell script that goes through grabs the images from Dropbox and packs them up. Threw this into a Run Phase and it has simplified my life a great deal. When he adds new graphics they are already ready for me to code up.
