ParticleFX Studio: particle effects for games, made in your browser
Build game-ready particle effects on a live canvas, or describe them and let the AI agent build them. Loops are frame-perfect, pixel art uses real palettes, and exports drop straight into your engine.
Features
- 510+ premade effects with free GIF and spritesheet downloads: spells, explosions, impacts, weather, sci-fi weapons, platformer and shmup effects, transitions, pixel art, UI and mobile game juice
- Sprite FX: dissolve, burn away, freeze or hit-flash your own character sprite
- An AI agent that builds an effect from a description, checks the render and fixes it
- Pixel art mode with palette lock (Endesga 32, PICO-8, Game Boy, DawnBringer)
- Perfect loops, keyframes, collision, lightning and laser layers, paths, attractors and vortices
- Exports: GIF, APNG, WebM with alpha, MP4, PNG frames, and spritesheets for Unity, Godot 4, Phaser, PixiJS, GameMaker and Aseprite
- Hands-on lessons that build a campfire step by step, plus technique and Sprite FX lessons
- Effect pages in English, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese
What is ParticleFX Studio?
ParticleFX Studio is a browser-based tool for making 2D particle effects for games: explosions, hits, spells, pickups, auras, weather and UI effects. Effects are baked into GIFs, APNGs and spritesheets that any engine plays as a sprite animation, so they look the same everywhere and cost about as much as one animated sprite. It is made by Explain AI Ltd in the UK.
- Who it is for: indie and hobby game developers, game jam teams and studios that need effects without a VFX artist.
- Price: the studio, the library and its downloads are free. A free account exports 3 effects a day and gets 20 AI agent builds to start, then 3 a day. Plans start at $7.99 a month.
- Engines: Unity, Godot 4, GameMaker, Phaser, PixiJS, Aseprite and any engine that plays sprite animations; web games can use the live runtime.
- Licence: exported effects are yours to use in commercial games, with no credit required.
- AI: an agent builds effects from a description, and an MCP server lets Claude Code, Cursor and other AI apps make and export effects.
Guides
- How to make a pixel art explosion
- Fire spritesheets for 2D games
- Looping VFX that never pop
- Hit flash and dissolve effects on a sprite
- All guides, engine guides (Unity, Godot, GameMaker, Phaser) and comparisons with Pixel FX Designer, SpriteMancer and Effekseer
Open the studio or describe an effect to the agent. Free, nothing to install.
Need sprites too? SpriteLab makes pixel-art characters, items, animations and tilesets from a text prompt.