Try it
That's our rootling on a real 16‑pixel canvas. Draw on it. Right‑click erases. Wreck it, Reset brings it back.
The actual editor is this, grown up: frames and a walk cycle you can drag to reorder, onion skin, a fill and a line tool that only draws the lines pixel art wants, a palette that builds itself from your sprite, and a live preview of your creature at the size a player actually sees it, standing on the game's own ground next to creatures already shipped.
Everything you open is kept in your browser and comes back next visit. Undo goes back 200 steps.
The point
Exporting to a downloads folder and dragging files back where they belong is the worst part of every browser tool, so Myrling doesn't do that. Open PNGs — or drop them on the window — and Save over writes your edits straight back into the originals, wherever they live. In the Mac app the path bar shows the file's true folder, not a guess.
Starting from a blank sprite instead? Click the path beside its name, pick any
folder once, and Save writes every frame there — name‑0.png,
name‑1.png — straight into your game's art directory. Works in
Chrome and Edge through the File System Access API, and in the Mac app natively.
Guardrails
Myrling was born inside Realms of Eldermyr, whose art packer refuses files that break its rules. So the editor checks them live, the same way the packer does, and is honest about which problems block you and which are just worth a look:
Refused. Part see-through pixels, a non-square picture, more than 32 colours, an empty frame, a name that cannot be a filename.
Worth a look. Nothing on the bottom row — the game plants that row at the creature's feet, so it would hover. One frame only. No clear pixels at all.
Clean. What you drew is what ships, pixel for pixel. No outline added, no shadow to paint; the game does both.
Not shipping into Eldermyr? One checkbox turns the rules off: soft, part see-through pixels and any colour count are then kept exactly as painted, through save, export and browser storage alike. And the rules themselves are ordinary code in one readable file — fork it and make it enforce your game's rules instead.
The editor
Pencil, fill, eraser, and a line tool that snaps every drag to flat, upright, or a true one-for-one diagonal. An opacity slider blends paint with what's underneath — once per stroke, so a slow drag never darkens its own line.
Add, copy, delete, drag tiles to rearrange. Onion skin shows the frame before, faintly. Play runs the walk cycle at game size, which is the only honest way to judge one.
Select a box, copy it, paste it into the same sprite or a different one. Pastes land floating so you drag them into place before they set down.
A 16-pixel sprite tells you nothing at 16 pixels. The preview draws yours the size a player sees it, on the game's grounds, next to a grave rat, the hero and an ogre already in the game.
Every tool key rebinds in Settings — click a key, press a new one. A taken key swaps so nothing goes unreachable. Kept in your browser.
The wheel zooms around your cursor: the pixel under it stays under it. The side columns drag wider when the sprite list or panels need room.
The Mac app
Not a port — the Mac app is index.html, unchanged, behind a single
Swift file. WebKit has no File System Access API, so a 100-line bridge fills in the
corner Myrling uses: real open panels, real folder pickers, Save over writing real
files, exports landing in Downloads.
Unzip it and drag Myrling into Applications. It is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarised by Apple, so it opens with an ordinary double-click, and runs on macOS 11.3 or later, Apple silicon or Intel.
It keeps itself current. On launch it asks GitHub whether the editor page has moved on, and takes the new one if it has — so a fix lands in your copy without you downloading anything. Every page is signed with an Ed25519 key, checked before it is kept, and refused outright if the signature does not match; Check for Updates… in the Myrling menu asks now, and the toggle beside it turns the automatic check off.
Or build it yourself, with the Xcode command line tools and nothing else:
git clone https://github.com/Josiah-Turnquist/myrling-sprite-editor
cd myrling-sprite-editor
make run # builds dist/Myrling.app and opens itAd-hoc signed — all a local tool needs. The Dock icon is itself a 16-pixel sprite, drawn by a hundred lines of dependency-free Python.
Take it
The whole tool is readable in an afternoon: one HTML file for the editor, one Swift file for the shell, one script for the icon. Swap the palette, the checks and the reference creatures for your own game's, and you have a sprite editor that knows your rules.