You can get semi-decent sprite work out of GenAI models, but you still have to put in some manual work (scale normalization, palette reduction, grid alignments, etc). It's definitely not "out-of-the-box" yet.
Yeah, I think you’re right. I think the hardest part would honestly be maintaining some level of consistency as your project grows its number of assets - otherwise there's no sense of a common stylistic theme.
The agentic tooling in some of the latest models is getting pretty crazy too - somebody on Reddit recently shared an example of using GPT-6 Astra to generate sprites with Aseprite, an open-source, popular pixel art editor and it worked shockingly well.
The key is making them one frame at a time, rather than asking for the whole sheet. Adherence frame-to-frame with a reference image is really good, so just prompt with the previous + direction. I finally got Nano Banana to make fairly decent fluid animations that way.
I've been struggling with this for a few years for Yoto LED icons. Design rules didn't cut it, but a pymagick workflow did, more or less.
I have abandoned the work I was doing, but if you provide the image constraints along with some examples and descriptions of those examples using the terminology of your constraints, you should get something iterable.
Interesting. I'm surprised they haven't prioritised/deliberately trained for this more because of how useful it is to ask codex to generate some images/assets/sprites when building sill games. It would dramatically enhance how polished it's games were.
That said for single images the old model was already okayish for prototypes
You can get semi-decent sprite work out of GenAI models, but you still have to put in some manual work (scale normalization, palette reduction, grid alignments, etc). It's definitely not "out-of-the-box" yet.
https://mordenstar.com/other/hobbes-animation
Really nice share. I bet you could automate the manual work with today's models
Yeah, I think you’re right. I think the hardest part would honestly be maintaining some level of consistency as your project grows its number of assets - otherwise there's no sense of a common stylistic theme.
The agentic tooling in some of the latest models is getting pretty crazy too - somebody on Reddit recently shared an example of using GPT-6 Astra to generate sprites with Aseprite, an open-source, popular pixel art editor and it worked shockingly well.
Shameless plug, but I built an image generation app with tools for sprite sheet and cutting out the sprites automatically.
Added support for GPT 2.5
http://batchbanana.com/
It's better to use a specialized model for that https://retrodiffusion.ai
>"Still can't make sprite sheets :("
The key is making them one frame at a time, rather than asking for the whole sheet. Adherence frame-to-frame with a reference image is really good, so just prompt with the previous + direction. I finally got Nano Banana to make fairly decent fluid animations that way.
No but it can write a tool that can.
Go on... I'm listening.
I've been struggling with this for a few years for Yoto LED icons. Design rules didn't cut it, but a pymagick workflow did, more or less.
I have abandoned the work I was doing, but if you provide the image constraints along with some examples and descriptions of those examples using the terminology of your constraints, you should get something iterable.
Interesting. I'm surprised they haven't prioritised/deliberately trained for this more because of how useful it is to ask codex to generate some images/assets/sprites when building sill games. It would dramatically enhance how polished it's games were.
That said for single images the old model was already okayish for prototypes
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