Ethanon Engine is a free 2D game development tool focused on the recent video cards for hardware acceleration and shader effects. Any game style is allowed, such as top-down view RPGs, side scrollers and shoot'em up games. The main goal is to provide high-quality lighting, shadow and particle effects with an easy to use visual interface, simple and direct scripting environment.
Entirely based on 2D sprites, Ethanon Engine uses pixel shaders to perform normal map based lighting and supports many sorts of map design (e.g.: isometric, orthogonal, hexagonal) since it is based on arbitrarily positioned entities instead of fixed tiles.
Game flow on Ethanon Engine is controlled by the AngelScript language, which brings familiar Java/C#/C++ syntax to gameplay scripts.