I built a browser-based pixel-art & animation editor with Vue, Laravel and AI

Short summary

A solo developer shares the architecture behind Pixanima, a browser-based pixel-art and animation editor with an AI assistant. Key technical decisions include a deterministic post-processing pipeline to convert diffusion model output into clean pixel art, an idempotent credit ledger for AI usage billing, and AI inbetweening via Google's FILM model. The business model gates only AI features behind payment since client-side editor functionality can't be meaningfully paywalled.

• •Deterministic PHP GD pipeline converts diffusion output into grid-aligned, quantized pixel art — not just prompting 'pixel art'
• •Idempotent credit ledger with row-level locking prevents double-charges and auto-refunds on AI failures
• •AI inbetweening uses Google FILM + ffmpeg to generate editable in-between animation frames from two keyframes
• •Editor is free forever; only AI features are paid because they're the sole server-side, marginal-cost component

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.