About Turtletoy

Turtletoy allows you to create hand-coded art using a minimalistic JavaScript Turtle graphics API. You can only create black-and-white line drawings on a square canvas. By offering a very restrictive environment, we not only hope to stimulate creativity but we also make sure that the turtles can be plotted using a pen plotter.

You can read the Turtle API reference first or directly start writing your own turtle here.

Each turtle can be exported as SVG, suitable for high-res printing or a plotter.

A note on AI and creative coding

Turtletoy is a creative coding platform where the joy lies in crafting turtles yourself. While it is perfectly fine to ask an AI for help understanding a concept or debugging an issue, please do not use AI to generate entire turtles and publish them as your own work.

This undermines what makes this community valuable: the ability to learn from each other's hand-crafted techniques. When you browse turtles here, you should be able to trust that you are seeing genuine human creativity and problem-solving. Code worth studying and learning from.

Turtles that appear to be AI-generated may be set to Unlisted.

Software requirements

To run Turtletoy it is recommended that you use the latest version of one of the following browsers:

• Chrome: http://www.google.com/chrome
• Microsoft Edge: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/microsoft-edge
• Firefox: http://www.mozilla.org
• Safari: http://www.apple.com/safari

Support

You can support the development of Turtletoy by giving feedback on how to improve this website. Feel free to report bugs, suggest improvements or request new features.
If you want, you can also buy me a coffee. Donations are highly appreciated and will be used to cover hosting costs and to buy (more) coffee.

Credits

Turtletoy is created by Reinder Nijhoff (@reindernijhoff.net).

A very special thanks to Íñigo Quílez and Pol Jeremias for creating Shadertoy, the inspiration behind Turtletoy.