Pixin Builder

A no-code visual editor for 2D point-and-click adventures. The whole game is one serializable data document, played by a PixiJS v8 engine that runs without the editor.

▶ Play the demo 📖 Documentation

📦 Install

Scaffold a project — the editor and engine, wired up:

npm create @theideaguards/pixin my-game
cd my-game && npm install && npm run dev   # open ?edit for the editor

Add -- --template demo for this demo game — or embed the engine in your own app:

npm install @theideaguards/pixin

npm ↗ · 📖 Editor documentation · GitHub ↗

🤖 Ships with Claude Code skills

Clone the repo and an AI assistant can drive the editor and author your game with you:

pixin-gamedoc — the GameDoc schema mental model; edit game.json directly.
pixin-editor — “I want to make X” → the exact panel and steps.
pixin-recipes — ready-made mechanic recipes: locked door, fetch quest, stealth beat, branching dialogue, cutscene, conditional weather, global rules and more.

Everything the editor can do

Scenes & layers

Multi-scene worlds with fade transitions
Image, animated & procedural layers — place, reorder, parallax
Walkable areas + obstacle holes; depth scaling
Spawn points; follow / pillar-box camera per scene

Interactions & items

Hotspots: pickable, interact, exit, inspect, enter-triggers
Inventory with combine recipes & “use item on object”
Examine “look at” text (incl. state-dependent)
One condition / effect vocabulary gates everything

Characters & animation

Frame-by-frame atlases → AnimatedSprite
8-direction walk cycles (mirrored), idle / pickup / interact / talk
Conditional appearance variants (swap by flag)
Stitch individual frames into an atlas in-editor

NPCs & dialogue

Global cast placed per scene; movement paths (loop / pingpong)
Branching dialogue trees with conditional choices
Typewriter text + skip; per-NPC voice (gibberish or uploaded)
Ambient monologues & world-space speech bubbles

Cross-scene NPC routines

Per-NPC node-graph routine (React Flow)
Stations + timed / conditional transitions
Named scene paths by reference; a home scene
Persistent off-scene progression

Stealth

NPC vision: range + cone + line-of-sight (holes occlude)
Crouch at cover; foreground occlusion hides the player
Player-approach detection — the NPC walks over and speaks

Cutscenes

Scripted sequences: wait / move / anim / face / dialog
Camera focus + zoom override
Fully skippable; started by an effect or on scene entry

Audio

Global Sounds library (reference by id)
Per-scene conditional ambient; per-walker footsteps
SFX, per-animation sound, voice while speaking

Atmosphere & lighting

Weather presets (rain / snow / dust) with full sliders
Point emitters (smoke / embers); fog with back & front layers
Ambient + local lights (sphere / cone, flicker)
Dark scenes + player torch & mask; colour grade, vignette, lightning

Time & logic

Game clock & time-of-day; time-window gating
Global rules engine (reactive when → then)
Auto-generated logic graph of the flag web

Screens, UI & saves

Editable loading / title / game-over / end / credits screens
Font picker; text-size & volume settings
Save / load with a Continue slot

The live editor

Floating, multi-window editor over the live running world
Tune lighting / weather / NPCs / camera in context — no reload
Jump scene, set flags, give items, scrub time while authoring
Export / import the whole game as one JSON document