The Mission Pinball Framework can interface will all kinds of controllers. Either P-Roc/FAST/SPIKE/OPP/Lisy or others such as fadecandy, arduino or RPi. If you want to go with serial LEDs I would recommend the Fadecandy. Very inexpensive, reliable and scalable. Also supports temporal dithering and fades in hardware. In the MPF ecosystem there are currently at least two different tools to create light shows. One is rendering shows live and the other offline. Alternatively you can create shows by hand editing show files.

General show documentation: http://docs.missionpinball.org/en/latest/shows/content.html. Offline show creator is here: https://github.com/missionpinball/showcreator. Online show creator just uses the playfield as a virtual display which means that you can use all widgets: http://docs.missionpinball.org/en/latest/displays/widgets/index.html and then use display_light_player to map the display to your lights. It's rendered using OpenGL.

Jan