Open-source pixel art editor with animation and auto-tiling tilesets
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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/simplepixelartWhat 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 pixelsSome 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 fileHonest 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?
HN · launched Aug 7, 2026 · 8 upvotes (top 53%) · 1 view
Niche: browser-based image editors · 159 launches, 10 in the last 7 days ▼ -41% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Media & entertainment
- Content generation
- Prosumer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 159 launches in browser-based image editors →
Could you build this?
Yes A browser-based pixel art editor with HTML5 Canvas, layers, and tile-mapping algorithms is well within the scope of modern AI-assisted web development.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Aseprite
Concerns raised: workflow switching costs for existing users
Feature requests: ping-pong style loop option
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 718 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #313 of 719 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 277 days after the earliest competitor.
- NOIRADIX Studio · ph · 2026-11-08 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.64
- PixAssets · ph · 2026-09-25 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- pixelforge · github · 2026-10-04 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.58
- Pixel Art Maker · ph · 2026-11-03 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- PixelForge Pro v3.0 · ph · 2026-11-08 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- Minecraft Pixel Art Generator · ph · 2026-09-09 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- Pixel Pak · ph · 2026-10-20 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Pixel-Art-Matrix-Editor · github · 2026-10-21 · 35 upvotes · similarity 0.52
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