I occasionally dabble with game development but my skill with pixel art is severely lacking so I rely a lot on some great free resources such as Kenny and OpenGameArt. Take a look at some of the more or less finished examples below.
Valentine's Adventure
I thought this would be a fun way of learning some JavaScript and it was, but I probably spent about 10% of the time writing code and the rest doing pixel art.
I used Phaser as the framework, while I don't have much experience with other frameworks I thought it was pretty great as a piece of free software.
I also used Piskel for creating sprites and other assets and Tiled for creating tile maps, both of which I would recommend.
WARNING: I made this as a Valentine's day present for my partner so it's a bit soppy. (Play at your own risk)
PlayCheese Quest
I made this game as a christmas present for a friend using the same tech stack as Valentine's Adventure.
I thought it would be super quick as I already knew what I was doing and wasn't putting a lot of effort into creating the assets, but it turned out to be a big time suck as I ended up experimenting with making it mobile friendly.
It's a very dumb concept and much shorter than Valentine's Adventure, but I made up for that by making it almost unenjoyably hard.
Play