Novaboard

December 10, 2025

Oh, hey! Hi!

Nice to meet you all, my name is Marcelo, and I am here today to talk about Novaboard’s story and a little bit about myself.

I’ve always wanted to work with game development, but for one reason or another, I have never fully committed to it. I always thought that game dev was too risky and preferred to work on something more “hireable”, and that is why I became a full-stack web developer, focused on front-end.

How the project started:

In 2025, I finally decided that I would give game development a try. Some friends and I decided that we would make each a game in about 2 months. We knew we wouldn’t succeed in developing a full profitable game to publish on Steam yet, so we started making small games to stretch our game development skills.

While working on my game entry, I noticed that working with Aseprite assets wasn't as easy as I'd hoped, since I had to buy and install it, but I saw no reason why there couldn’t be a web editor capable of it.

So instead of working on another game, I took my “game development slot” of 2 months to build such a tool (I’m already late, btw). That is how I’ve started working on Novaboard: a free, browser-based pixel art editor that can open and save Aseprite files.

I built it to solve a need I had while building my hobby indie game project, and I believe it will be useful for pixel artists and for other indie game devs.

What Novaboard can do:

- Free and runs directly in your browser

- no download or account required

- Opens Aseprite (.ase) and PSD files

- edit existing assets without buying software

- Infinite canvas with multiple boards

- work on several sprites in one workspace

- Full animation timeline

- frames, playback, and live preview for sprite animations

- Visual history with branches

- undo/redo with full timeline, never lose a version

- Exports to sprite sheets, GIF, APNG, and timelapse