LÖVE

What do you guys normally use to make maps for your games? I can't find any that really work, should I just use images? I'm not advanced enough yet to make an exporter or anything like that.

Is your game tile based? I find ascii-input to work fairly well for those. For non-ascii maps, consider using a hardness map with an overlayed image as the base for your map, and then adding in moving entities programmatically.

In Ascii-input for tiles your maps look like this: Your code would then read through each line and convert each character into the proper tile-type (so X could be a wall and S could be the player)

With a hardness map you draw a regular map, and then make a copy of it and draw it only in a few colors, with black being blocking terrain, white being passable, and maybe green being slowing or something. Then you draw the real map to the screen, but scan the hardness map to determine whether your character can move to a location or not.

Those are just some basic examples though, maybe others have better solutions.

I am using Tiled and Advanced Tiled Loader.

Edit: And for the graphics, you can use free game art from this web page: Opengameart or try to find an artist that draws images for you.