Pixelfx is 244 free pixel art effects as code for games

A one-person game maker spends a weekend trying to draw a fireball sprite that looks right. The flame flickers wrong, the sparks miss the beat, the whole thing looks flat. Pixelfx is a free, open-source library of 244 pixel art effects, every one a small piece of code. Each one plays live, recolors on request and exports to a sprite sheet for any engine.

The project is at github.com/patch-gg/pixelfx under the MIT licence. It reached 591 stars and 82 forks in its first day on GitHub. It also sits at rank 16 on Trendshift's daily list. Trendshift ranks GitHub repositories by the pace of new stars.

What is in the library

The readme groups the 244 effects into 21 categories. Fire has 12 effects. Explosions, water, lightning, sci-fi and melee have 12 each. Ice has 10. The spawn and death group has 10, which covers coin drops, respawn beams and the "poof". The arcane group has 12, with spells, beams and portals. The nature group has 13. The weather group has 12, with aurora, blizzard and falling leaves. The UI group has 12, with achievement cards, combo counters and confetti.

A sub-group of 12 called moves chains effects into attacks. Each move names the wind-up, the freeze on contact, the push on the target and the recovery.

How a game picks one up

In a browser game, the code is a plain import. It needs no engine. The library writes to a canvas. Phaser, PixiJS, Kaplay and three.js all read it. Install from GitHub with one command, or copy the core and the effects you want.

For other game engines, a script exports a transparent PNG grid of frames and an Aseprite-style JSON. Godot, Unity, GameMaker, Defold, LÖVE and Bevy all read that pair. Phaser's atlas loader and the Aseprite importers for Godot and Unity accept it unchanged.

Every effect takes a palette, which is a dark-to-bright ramp of hex colours. So a fire can burn blue and a heal can glow pink without touching the effect's code.

The Claude Code skill

The project carries a Claude Code skill that teaches the agent to find, use, export and make effects. A game maker installs it as a plugin, then asks for what they want in plain words. One example in the readme is "add a frost nova to my mage's ultimate". Another is "make five takes on a coin pickup sparkle and show me the best two". A third is "this hit effect feels floaty, make it punchier".

The method the skill uses is Hugo Duprez's, from a Sprite Fusion blog post on pixel art effects. The readme calls it draft, render, look, refine. The agent draws, exports a contact sheet, looks at it and fixes the worst thing.

What a game team gets

For a solo game maker, pixelfx removes a week of pixel-pushing on each effect. For a team that already releases games, it is a starting point. They can recolour and reshape it with code, not with a Photoshop file. Each effect is seeded, so frame 40 plays the same every time. Replays and tests stay stable.

Source

patch-gg/pixelfx on GitHub.