Open-source pixel art editor with animation and auto-tiling tilesets
Hi HN! I built a free pixel art editor that runs entirely in the browser — no install, no signup, no watermark. The frontend is open source (MIT): https://github.com/comficker/simplepixelart What it does: - Sprite editor with layers, selections, mirror drawing, and an infinite-canvas workspace (multiple boards on one desk) - Frame-by-frame animation with onion skin, per-frame duration, GIF and spritesheet export - Tileset builder that auto-generates Wang-16 and blob-47 terrain sets from a single base tile — exports Godot 4 TileSet, Tiled .tsx, or PNG+JSON — plus a tilemap…
What it does
Make pixel art online free — draw on a pixel grid with brushes, fill, layers, mirror mode and custom palettes, then export a PNG. No download, no signup, runs in your browser.
SimplePixelArt is a free, browser-based pixel art maker — no installation and no account required. Make pixel art online by drawing directly on a pixel grid with a full set of editor tools, then export a clean PNG. New to it? Start with easy pixel art on a small grid. Draw on an empty part of the canvas to spawn a new board, then drag its label to arrange your workspace. Yes — completely free and running in your browser. No signup to start and no watermark. No. The editor runs in any modern web browser on desktop or mobile — nothing to download. Anywhere from 8×8 to 64×64 pixels. Smaller canvases suit icons and sprites; larger ones allow more detail. Yes. Pixelate a photo with the…from simplepixelart.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN! I built a free pixel art editor that runs entirely in the browser — no install, no signup, no watermark. The frontend is open source (MIT): https://github.com/comficker/simplepixelart What it does: - Sprite editor with layers, selections, mirror drawing, and an infinite-canvas workspace (multiple boards on one desk) - Frame-by-frame animation with onion skin, per-frame duration, GIF and spritesheet export - Tileset builder that auto-generates Wang-16 and blob-47 terrain sets from a single base tile — exports Godot 4 TileSet, Tiled .tsx, or PNG+JSON — plus a tilemap painter to test terrains in the browser - Isometric (2:1 dimetric) grid mode with an iso-line tool - Image-to-pixel-art converter: median-cut quantization, live adjustments, and a "pixel cleaner" that removes orphan pixels Some technical bits: - The renderer is a hand-rolled 2D canvas — no engine, no WebGL. Pixel maps are plain objects keyed "x_y" with an incremental dirty-pixel buffer, so a brush stroke costs ~0.006ms/frame instead of rebuilding the whole map - Guest-first storage: everything autosaves to localStorage, with the multi-board snapshot in IndexedDB to escape the ~5MB quota. An account is only needed for cloud sync and publishing to the gallery - Favorite recent bug: fitting a workspace of 16 isometric boards took 12.4 seconds. The iso lattice was drawn as O(cols×rows) individual diamonds — every shared edge stroked twice. Rewriting it as two families of parallel lines (O(rows+cols)) brought it down to 16ms - No CSS framework at runtime; the design system is one hand-written CSS file Honest caveat: the repo is the frontend only. The community gallery and auth run against a hosted API, but the editor itself — drawing, animation, tilesets, conversion, exports — is fully client-side and works without an account. Would love feedback, especially from anyone making game assets: what's missing before this could replace your current tool for quick sprites?
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