Phluxel

Description

Make your pixel art move. No frame-by-frame.

Bring a pixel scene you drew, or start from one of ours. Add rain, snow, fire, water, glow or wind, adjust it with sliders while it plays, and export a seamless loop. Phluxel moves the pixels you already have, so the drawing stays yours.

How it works

• Bring your art. Paint on the pixel grid, or import a PNG, JPG, BMP, WebP or animated GIF.

• Pick an effect. 128 effect templates: weather, fire and smoke, water and reflections, light and glow, wind and cloth, CRT and dithering, and classic cellular automata.

• Tune it live. Most effects come with sliders. Drag them and the canvas updates while it plays. Apply an effect to the whole picture, or paint it onto only the parts you want.

• Export a loop. Seamless GIF with ping-pong, APNG, PNG sequence, sprite sheets for game engines, or MP4 if you have ffmpeg installed.

90 starter scenes

Open the Starter Gallery and pick a scene: a noodle stand in the rain, a cable car in the snow, lanterns drifting downstream, a lighthouse on a windy cape. Each one opens already moving, with its own sliders, so you can see how it is built and change it.

Made for pixel art

• Your resolution, your pixels. Effects run cell by cell at the size you drew, and exports scale up by whole numbers, so edges stay sharp.

• Palette lock. Keep every exported frame inside a fixed palette, including Lospec .hex, GIMP .gpl and .pal files.

• Loops that close. Set the loop length and loop-aware effects bring the last frame back to the first, so the GIF does not jump when it repeats.

• Timeline and keyframes. Ramp effect settings over time, switch the canvas at a chosen step, and build longer sequences.

• No canvas size limit. Work at 128x128 or 4000x3000. Undo sizes itself to the canvas, so memory stays bounded.

Want more control? Write your own rules.

Every effect is a short, readable rule in Phlux, the small rule language inside Phluxel. Open any template, change a number, and see the result right away. When you want something new, describe how a cell becomes its next self from its neighbors, and Phluxel runs it on every pixel in real time.

[code]R = (N.R + S.R + E.R + W.R) / 4 // diffuse[/code]

The editor has a cheat sheet, autocomplete, inline hints and a live preview. Simple whole-canvas rules compile to GPU shaders for large canvases. Everything else runs on a precise CPU interpreter, automatically.

Pay once

One purchase. No subscription, no account, and it works offline. Exports have no watermark and no resolution or frame limits, and you can use what you make commercially.

Try the free demo first

The demo includes every effect and every starter scene. Demo exports carry a small watermark, are limited to a 128x128 canvas, 1024 px output and 300 frames, are for non-commercial use, and cannot be saved as MP4, APNG or sprite sheets. Projects you make in the demo open in the full version.

Made by one developer

Phluxel is built and maintained by a single developer. Bug reports and ideas sent from Help > Send Feedback go straight to me.