I'm a solo dev, and for the past few months I've been building Pixanima — a pixel-art and animation editor that runs entirely in the browser, with an optional AI assistant baked in. It just launched, and I wanted to share the parts that were technically interesting: making a general image model output clean pixel art, an atomic credit system, AI inbetweening for animation, and why the whole business model falls out of one architectural fact.
What it is
Draw pixel art with layers, groups and effects, animate it on a frame timeline with onion-skin, and export to GIF / sprite sheets / PNG — all client-side, no install. On top of that, an AI assistant turns a text prompt into sprites, seamless tiles and palettes, re-poses characters, and generates in-between animation frames.
The frontend is Vue 3 driving an HTML canvas; the backend is Laravel 12 (PHP 8.4). Here's what I learned.
Everything runs in the browser — and that decided the business model
