CrunchyVFX

Make the effects for your game in minutes, then get back to the game.

CrunchyVFX is a pixel-art effect generator for people with a game to finish who'd rather not become an effects artist first. Pick a game moment (a hit, a pickup, a heal, an explosion), choose one of 209 presets, nudge a few plain-English sliders, and export it ready to drop into Godot 4: a scene that plays itself, signals the hit frame and cleans up when it's done. Sprite sheets work in any engine.

Every particle is drawn in code. No generative AI, no samples, no bundled art. What you make is yours under CC0: use it in any game, commercial included, no credit needed.

Free in your browser: crunchyvfx.com

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What it makes

• Effects for every game moment: 209 presets in 16 moments (Hit, Crit, Death, Spawn, Pickup, Heal, Power-up, Dash, Jump and Land, Projectile, Cast, Explosion, Shield, Status, Ambient, UI and Emote), each checked to read at real game size.

• Drop-in Godot scenes: one-shots play when spawned, send an impact signal on the hit frame and free themselves; loops loop. One line to use.
• 98 particle shapes, including the Icon particle: any of the suite's 193 pixel icons (hearts, coins, gems, skulls, button prompts) as particles.
• 58 layer systems to stack: shockwaves, rings, trails, rune circles, beams, lightning and more.
• Make more effects: the Wizard asks three questions and plays nine new effects, Breed evolves one you like, the Foundry invents candidates by kind and art style, and Randomize rolls a fresh one.

• Eras and palettes: crunch any effect to 8-bit, handheld, 16-bit or 32-bit, or lock it to your game's own palette (paste hex codes or load a .hex or .gpl file).
• Match a sound: paste a CrunchySFX sound link and it draws an effect to match, then exports the sound beside it.
• Quick Shape sliders (Violence, Softness, Chunkiness, Weight, Heat, Swirl, Busyness), with every detailed control underneath.

• Export: sprite sheets, frames, animated PNG and GIF, from 32 to 512 px at up to 8x, for Godot 4, Phaser 3, Aseprite or plain JSON, with optional bloom masks and variation packs (hit_01 … hit_08).

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Free on the web, desktop for your workflow

CrunchyVFX is free in your browser at crunchyvfx.com, with every effect, every preset and every export. Nothing is locked.

The desktop app ($6) adds workflow, never features:

• Plant it in your game's folder (Godot, Unity or any folder), and every effect you save lands in your project, in res://crunchy/vfx/, as the same sheet and ready scene Export gives you.
• Change an effect and re-save it in place, under the same path, so your scenes keep working. A guard stops any save or delete that would remove a file your game still uses.
• Sound on the hit frame: link a sound CrunchySFX planted in the same game, and the Godot scene plays it on the frame you choose.
• A Library of every effect you've planted, alongside what the other Crunchy tools have made for the same game.
• My Effects and categories, batch export, project files, native Save and Open dialogs, and dragging a sheet straight out into your editor.

Buying the desktop app is also how you keep the free version alive. Thank you.

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Part of the Crunchy suite

CrunchyVFX has siblings for tilesets, towns and world maps, CrunchyTile, and for sound effects, CrunchySFX. Free web tools for music (CrunchyBGM) and game UI (CrunchyUI) are already out, with more on the way. All follow the same rules: made in code, CC0, free on the web.

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Install notes

• Windows: the installer isn't code-signed yet, so SmartScreen may warn you. Click More info, then Run anyway.
• Linux: a Flatpak. Install it with flatpak install --user CrunchyVFX-1.0.0.flatpak. It asks for access to your home folder so it can save straight into your game's folder.