Ottomancer

I'm an animator. I've spent years working in Spine, and every time a job needed particles I hit the same wall — the tools were either enormous, expensive, welded to a game engine, or they couldn't hand me anything I could bring back into my animation pipeline.

So I built the thing I kept wishing existed: particle effects you can put together quickly, and export as JSON that drops straight into Spine next to the rest of your work. No round trip through a game engine. No redrawing frames by hand.

Ottomancer is a 2D particle and VFX editor that runs in a browser tab. Nothing to install, no account, nothing uploaded — your work stays on your machine.

It has a proper dope-sheet timeline, 75 ready-made effects across nine categories, 57 built-in sprites including animated 4×4 flipbook sheets, and a curve editor. You can import your own images and play them back as texture sheets.

It exports to things you can actually use: Spine-compatible JSON + atlas, PNG sequences, MP4 and WebM video, animated GIF and WebP, SVG, and a self-contained web bundle with its own player.

It's free because I genuinely think it will save people like me time and money. I've been the freelancer who couldn't justify another licence for one small piece of one job. So there is no paid version, no locked feature, no watermark, and everything you make with it is yours to sell.

This is a one-person, free-time project, so there will be rough edges. Bug reports are read.

On itch's AI disclosure: the editor itself — the timeline, the particle engine, the effects library and the hand-drawn sprite sheets — is my own work. I used an AI assistant for bug fixes, some of the website code and a good deal of the written copy, so the honest answer to the question is yes. No AI-generated artwork ships in this.

Full version on the web: ottomancer.com