Software for Web Browser

lvllvl is a browser editor for character-based art. It covers PETSCII and a long list of other machines' character sets, with layers, animation frames, custom tilesets and palettes, and it can generate frames from an uploaded image or video. Projects save to the browser, to GitHub or to Google Drive.

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.

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

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.

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.

Blockbench models boxy low-poly meshes with pixel textures painted directly on them, plus animation, and exports to game formats.

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.

ChipTone builds sound effects from layered oscillators, envelopes and effects with a lot more control than an sfxr style generator.

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.

Godot has a dedicated 2D renderer with pixel-snapping, nearest neighbour filtering and viewport scaling options that make low-resolution games straightforward.

Goxel is a free voxel editor with layers, a procedural renderer and unlimited scene size, available on every platform.

LibreSprite continues the last GPL version of Aseprite as a community project. It keeps the familiar layers, animation timeline and palette tools, and adds its own scripting and a browser build.

A basic web-based editor made to be simple and intuitive, which can load any palette from the Lospec palette list. It is no longer in development and may contain bugs.

Marq's PETSCII Editor is where most Commodore 64 character art gets drawn. It runs in a browser or on the desktop, covers animation and several C64 screen modes, and exports the data in the forms a real C64 program expects.

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

PICO-8 bundles a code editor, sprite editor, map editor, sound effect editor and tracker into one tiny virtual machine with strict limits that keep games small and finishable.

Phaser is the most used JavaScript framework for 2D games in the browser. It covers sprites, tilemaps, physics, input, audio and scene management, has a very large body of examples and tutorials behind it, and runs anywhere a browser does.

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.

Pixelorama is a full featured free editor: layers, animation with onion skinning, tile mode, palettes, and an active development pace. It runs on every desktop platform and in the 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.

SunVox combines a pattern tracker with a modular synthesizer, and runs the same on desktops, phones and the web.

TIC-80 is an open source fantasy console in the PICO-8 mould with a larger screen, several scripting languages, and built-in sprite, map, sound and music editors.

picoCAD builds small low-poly models out of a handful of shapes and textures them with a single tiny texture sheet, in a deliberately constrained toolset. Models and turntable renders export straight out of it.