Procedural Orb Generator

Warning: Some combinations of parameters can create large flashing animations which may trigger photosensitive epilepsy in certain people. Please be aware that pulsating or flashing images flashing in a significant portion of your field of view may be harmful to some. Use the tool responsibly.

About

I'm making a bullet hell game for the bullet hell jam 2022, and I needed some projectiles using a custom palette. I figured it would be easier to just animate the bullets in Javascript rather than drawing them in GIMP. So I did that, then I added another feature... and another... and like 10 more.

Anyway, here's a tool for generating orbs, bullets, particles, explosions, portals, dust and all kinds of other effects. It has a ton of different parameters you can set, and all of them have little tooltips which vaguely describe what they do. You can then export the orb as a spritesheet or as an animated PNG (APNG) file. Those work in most modern browsers.

How to use

You can either configure the orbs from scratch, loading your own horizontal palette image and fine-tuning all the parameters, or you can just click the RANDOMIZE EVERYTHING button and see what comes out.

Attribution

The tool uses a few open-source libraries.

For PNG exporting and importing, UPNG is used with the pako dependency:
https://github.com/photopea/UPNG.js/ https://github.com/nodeca/pako

For GIF exporting, Gif.js is used:
https://github.com/jnordberg/gif.js

The graphical user interface is created using dat.GUI:
https://github.com/dataarts/dat.gui

The perlin noise for clouds is created using the noisejs library:
https://github.com/josephg/noisejs

For doing conversions between the RGB and CIELAB color space, code from color-convert is used: https://github.com/Qix-/color-convert

For comparing colors, the Delta-E 1984 algorithm is used, through code adapted from https://github.com/zschuessler/DeltaE 

Once again, I hope you find this tool useful for your game development. Suggestions and critical feedback are welcome. I'm a bit slow to respond but I do read your comments.

(PS: If you want to share some good looking orbs, I'll put them in the sidebar)

These are the palettes used from lospec:
sweetie-16 pear36 endesga-32 pico-8 dawnbringers-8-color steam-lords commodore64 microsoft-windows zx-spectrum color-graphics-adapter cga-palette-0-high ammo-8 slso8 2bit-demichrome titanstone 1bit-monitor-glow