Software with Online

Novaboard runs in the browser and as a desktop app, with layers, animation and effects.

The pixel art editor

Gribble is a pixel art and animation editor that runs in the browser (gribble.app) or as an Android or iPhone app. One account syncs projects between all devices.

Website: gribble.app
Android: Play Store
iOS: App Store

Layers with opacity and 15 blend modes. Frame-by-frame animation with onion skin, frame tags and playback.

Every stroke is recorded, so a finished artwork can be exported as a timelapse.

The community features includes a global gallery with museum frames, a profile page, followers, likes and achievements.

Tools

Brushes, eraser, bucket, dither gradient, color picker, global color picker, ellipse tool, square tool, line tool, square select, lasso select, magic wand, dither, shading, outline, gradient, symmetry, smudge.

Features

Autosave, cloud-storage, timelapse, image/GIF imports, image/video/GIF/code/spritesheet exports, unique 9-patch mode and export, palette lock, alpha lock, themes, pixel perfect, 512x512 grids, palettes, gribble files (.grbl), artwork forking.

Piskel is an open source editor that runs in the browser, with layers, animation and a public gallery. Development has stopped, but it still works and is a common first editor.

BitFontMaker2 is a bitmap font editor that runs in a browser: draw each character on a small grid, set the widths, and download a TrueType file. It has been around a long time and stayed simple, which is why it is still the quickest way to get a pixel font out of an idea.

Bfxr adds new waveforms, filters and a mixer to the sfxr formula, and runs in the browser.

Bitsy is a tiny editor for making small worlds: a few rooms of 8x8 tiles, an avatar that walks around them, and short conversations with the things in them. The limits are the point - there is no scripting to speak of and two colours at a time - and a finished game is a single HTML file.

Bosca Ceoil is aimed squarely at people who have never written music. Everything is on one screen, the instruments are chosen from a list, and the scale and chord helpers make it hard to play a wrong note. Blue is the maintained rebuild of the original, and it runs on desktop and in a browser.

PuzzleScript is a browser engine where an entire puzzle game is a short text file: a legend of characters, a set of rewrite rules, and the levels drawn as ASCII. Games run and share as a single link, which has made it the usual home for small tile-based puzzle experiments.

ASCIIFlow is a browser scratchpad for drawing boxes, arrows and labels in plain ASCII, for diagrams that have to live inside a comment or a text file. There is nothing to install and nothing to sign into.

Censor is a standalone palette analyser inspired by DawnBringer's Palette Analyser for GrafX2, with a compatible layout. It helps with creating and evaluating restricted palettes by providing visualisations and highlighting certain properties.

It can be used in a browser on Lospec, by uploading an image or opening the analysis from any palette on the Lospec palette list. The command line version, installed with Cargo, reads a palette from an image, a text file, a list of hex codes or a Lospec palette name, and can also output its metrics as CSV.

Analyse Palette was created by Richard "DawnBringer" Fhager as part of DB's Toolbox, a collection of Lua scripts for GrafX2. It generates a single image showing how a limited palette covers the color spectrum, along with other information about the palette.

PureAsbestos converted it to run outside of GrafX2, so it can be used in a browser on Lospec without any other software. Upload a pixel art image of up to 2048x2048 pixels and 256 colors to analyse its palette, or open the analysis from any palette on the Lospec palette list.

FontStruct builds fonts by snapping shapes together on a grid, which makes it a natural fit for pixel and bitmap lettering. Finished fonts download as TrueType, and the site is also a large public gallery of fonts other people have built, most of which can be opened and taken apart.

GDevelop builds games out of events - conditions and actions picked from a list - rather than code, which makes it a common first engine. It handles tilemaps, 2D lighting, physics and multiplayer, exports to web, desktop and mobile, and the underlying engine is open source.