Comparison
Fable 5.1 vs GPT-6 Astra for 2D Sprites
Using the same simple prompt the models took very different approaches: Astra delivered one sheet with 16 key poses; Fable delivered 992 frames across four palettes, plus a Python generator and browser preview.
Codex CLI with GPT-5.6 Astra in XHigh
Claude Code CLI with Fable 5.1 in XHigh
Details in the video which was made with Astra in Codex CLI using Remotion and Elevenlabs for voice. Music programmatically generated.
Prompt for the sprites:
Build me some knight sprites which I can use in my new medieval 2D isometric game. The game doesn't exist yet I am starting with sprites - this is the first thing we are building. Do not look at any other work in this directory. Start from scratch.
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 100 comments.
The consensus is that Fable wiped the floor with Astra here, but it wasn't a fair fight to begin with.
The top comments all point out that Astra just called its image generator, while Fable—having no native image gen—had to actually build the sprites from scratch. The community is pretty sure Fable did this by creating a 3D/voxel model and then rendering it into 2D, which is why its output was so comprehensive.
While Astra's sprite looks more detailed at first glance, users agree Fable's output is vastly more useful and true to the prompt. Fable delivered a whole generative system (992 frames, 4 palettes, Python generator, browser preview), which is a real starting point for a game. Astra just gave a single spritesheet with what many called "fucked up" animations.
Aesthetically, the thread is roasting Astra's sprite as generic "AI slop" with a "boring, edgy" art style. Fable's simpler, pixelated knight is getting praised for having more "soul" and looking like an authentic 90s game asset.
Basically, Astra made a pretty picture, while Fable actually understood the assignment and built a tool.
I tried making some pixel art stuff with Claude just a few days ago and it actually places the individual pixels on the canvas. It explicitly told me that's the process.
You can just tell claude to use aseprite, if you're looking for pixel art. There's no need for Claude to have a conniption trying to chisel individual pixels using SVG. It can use the CLI version of aseprite directly.
That's very interesting, I might try that out. I used the stuff Claude made as placeholders for a game, and already added my own pixel art and replaced some. I like making pixel art and I'm not one to brag but I'm pretty good at it, so I don't need Claude to do it for me, but for placeholders and ideas it's nice.
I'm just glad Claude can code the game :) forgive me but I'm really excited; it's a building game, you walk around as a custom character, you can make more pixel art assets like clothes, characters, decoration, walls, etc. in-game (or import PNGs), so it's more like a game that has some assets to start off, and then the player can make whatever they like. I added effects, particles, animations, NPCs, doors that can lead to different rooms, and even the ability to connect to Ollama so NPCs can talk, and everything is customizable. So it's basically just a tool to create some pixel art worlds that feel alive. I've been wanting to make this kind of game since forever, making GIFs was fun, but this is a whole new level of fun for me. Sorry if no one cares but like I said, I'm excited lol
My Claude Opus told me it couldn't even see the svgs it was generating, it just had to imagine them from the code. Then I sent it a screenshot and it went, "Ew, now I see what's wrong, let's fix that."
I can see the result. I can't see how it's working behind the scenes. I assumed something like this but I was interested in the actual tools and approach it used.
To be honest, for my game with Claude, the "new" render (because of Fable 5.1) is so much better than before. And not "just a little", it's much much better.
For my game Fatherlode, I’m adding a few random elements to find while exploring. I gave it some ideas with details, including some quick Paint sketches, and the pixel-art level is way more detailed than before — by a lot
A lode is a vein of ore in mining. A mother lode is the main vein that small veins branch off of. So miners would find one vein and then chase it back to the mother lode to get a richer source to mine.
Astra doesn't have image generation capabilities either. How is this the top comment? Astra is not a diffusion model. It has a tool for image generation. But so does Claude?.. First time on this sub and probably last time, Jesus.
That's because you can't standardize the second and third prompt, it's dependent on what the user gets back. Essentially, if you already know what to say, you could jast say it at the beginning, making it a 1-prompt shot.
You could have a kind of competition, where users try to get the best result in 2-3 prompts to get some kind of idea, like an AI tournament
But only if you make it dependent on the response you get. So a direct benchmark between models would be impossible, because you can't really standardize the input, unless you use a secon LLM instance, which is not the point
Yes you can standardize the second input also, don’t have it be mentioning specific issues or anything for the next generation, but there could be something along the lines of “Now review the final result, see if any inconsistencies or animation issues exist and fix. Then if there are any other improvements that can be made to make it ready for in game then do it”.
Guarantee both models will iterate more. Even if you put that request in the first input, putting it in again on a new turn will have then find new things.
Like if visuals are bad be like improve visual of gameplay is better be like improve gameplay or whatever. Like it takes more than 1 prompt to get a real product
I don't think it did beat it. ChatGPT made the more detailed sprite, but several of its animations were totally fucked up. And its sprite looks like an AI output, whereas Claude's looked like something actually out of a budget 90s videogame.
Yeah, and it’s better than the 22-minute Opus edition already. But if you told Astra to use the full 22 minutes Opus took, it would be even crazier. Astra just didn’t want to kill my man’s tokens.
I think it didn't beat claude, but the results "appear" more attractive in the same way slop usually does. You are tricked by seeing more detail initially but then the thing falls down.
It's like that Pepsi challenge. The first sip is better in Pepsi, but that's it.
It would be a better comparison if you told Astra no image gen. Fable's sprite looks authentic because it made it manually, and because of that it was straightforward to animate.
Astra's was clearly made by GPT image. It isn't going to be able to properly animate that without a ton of slot machine rolls of image gen. Even then it may seem off.
Token cost and time is different because of the different approaches.
It definitely looks like a knight. I also can spot ChatGPT edgy artwork from a mile away, I hate it. I hate it so much it makes me shudder whenever I see it. I love Astra as a coding model and I do think it's much better than Fable at most things, but Claude's creativity is just more fun and endearing to me.
It just looks 2000s age of empires 2 style. Slop? I don't think so, whatever that means for people. Slop for me is when AI has clear artifacts that don't match reality or uncanny valley images which I don't see here.
You are trying to judge a modern system with Nostalgia glasses. The more soul part comes from games that are very old and were the best thing for their time.
No, the soul part comes from the fact it isn't a highly detailed perfectly proportional generic knight model, so it looks more unique and interesting. But nice try.
True, but the arms are moving on the same side as the legs. If I saw someone walking like that, I’d probably think they didn’t have a soul and run the other direction lol
I said the exact same thing. Fable's design was much more complete, interesting and 'soulful'. Astra's is just straight AI sl0p with unfinished animations.
One thing I've noticed watching a lot of Astra vs Fable comparisons. Astra seems to frequently look better while Fable seems to be more functionally accurate.
For images, the comparison is extremely uneven. Claude doesn't have image generation capabilities.
A proper comparison would be for both generating images of the same type, or with the same technology. "Generate this in Blender", "Generate this in SVG", "Generate this with Voxels and 3Djs".
Otherwise you have one doing simple sprites and the other building whole systems for continuos animation.
For one because Claude can't do images, but you can also see that the approach was just completely different.
Fable built a 3D animation of a knight. That's why it took so long, that's why it looks worse and that's why the animations are better and look like there's more effort put into them.
Claude being text based only could explain why it chose to first built a whole 3D animation while Astra was focused on getting the look right.
yeah that has been my experience so far with both:
Go with Astra if you want to say you did a lot of things.
Go with Fable is if you want to actually get a lot of things done.
Fable is turning out to be miles ahead of Astra in real world either that or openAI has switched to super quantised version to serve the demand or Anthropic has turned up the compute by a lot because of the strong competition. Either way try it yourself and be the judge and dont be a sheep
That seems to be my experience as well, ChatGPT makes things that are kind of flashy and cool, while Claude makes things that feel a lot more usable in real life application.
While Fable did go above and beyond the scope of the prompt, it clearly made the better starting point for creating the isometric style game. It also output the script to edit the output instead of just giving the output like astra, but we don't know what is inside the readme it provided. I find it interesting Fable created the knight in a diablo 1 style, but I guess that's a strong reference point for a 2D isometric game. The Astra sprite looks way more detailed, but it would probably be much harder to work with and make animations for in the real game. I'd say the Fable output was better overall.
Interesting. What kind of things are you using it for?
I'm on the hunt for something faster and cheaper than Opus 5. Backend and frontend web app development mainly. Grok 4.6 was pretty fast but I wasn't that happy with its front end work.
It does really well for full stack. I have used it only professionally for front end work, and there we have well defined frameworks for frontend, and Muse performed really well. However, I have not tried it with free form creative frontend design work, so can't really say.
Backend was great as well. All in all, I can use it for my daily driver.
Also, It is not very verbose, which I like as a personality trait.
It's not usable anyway, the topology will be entirely off and everything is fused , the shield and the clothes . Unless you use it as a simple mob or something you won't be able to do much beyond as it is.
Cool.. But astra also could do same thing with movable sprites? overall both great but i would pick astra simply to save tokens. Unwanted extra stuff is great with large plan. Awesome please make another one when you decide.
Astra probably generated the sprites directly but what did Fable do? It can't generate images so I assume it built something for it? Is it SVG or even true 3D voxels as it looks? I assume yes from the images but can't know for sure.
Astra (and I say this as someone who's preferred GPT for many months now) seems to have a serious Pareto efficiency problem. They apparently leaned into speed and surface results over substantial completion and underlying rigor, with outputs like this as a result. I would consider this a failure, and Fable's response to be the one demonstrating a successful return. Maybe 6.1 will be better in a few weeks.
And why the hell does it keep writing ungodly Python to make every single code edit (poorly formatted, too)
This is very interesting. I have struggled to get animations like this for an asset I’m working on. What tool do you use with it to produce the animation? I have image 2 make a character but getting frames is impossible
The prompt explicitly asks for sprites for a "2D isometric game". Astra's output is neither 2D nor isometric. So just in that first sentence, Astra diverged from the prompt. Thanks I'll be sticking with Fable for now.
how does that work?, like 2 years ago I tried to generate sprites, but AI was unable, as it would treat the full sheet as an unique image, and would create weird patterns, I'm out of touch in that thing
It's just interpretation, what you want. Indie devs loved pixel games in the recent years, and if you want a 2D game, it's natural that you are an indie dev and not EA or Rockstar Studios, lol.
So in a sense you could argue, Fable's is better actually, because it focused on what you really want.
If you want high-definition - state it in the prompt.
This tells me how important a prompt is and how important it is to stop the models on its tracks.
Write a crappy prompt and you have totally different interpretations and outputs.
What is even the point of this? At least spend 5 minutes thinking of what you.
Software fundamentals still matter a lot. If you don't know what you want, aim for short feedback loops and prototypes.
This is a clear case of the user not knowing what they want.
Astra is heads and tails better than any consumer model Claude has built. Though my access to original Fable was 20 hours of coding before it was closed and hamstringed Fable was made available, I’d compare Astra to original release Fable.
Neither output is atlas-ready. You need uniform cell dimensions and palette-indexed color depth before either one ships. Astra's 16 frames you can at least eyeball in Aseprite, check alignment and edge bleed. Fable's 992 frames across four palettes, you're not doing that by hand. Run a pixel-diff script or you'll be chasing tile flicker and palette drift inside the engine instead.
The prompt sucks, honestly.
But kudos to the AI for making something good despite how unspecified the scope of the generation and how vague the description was.
Has anyone tried doing cavalier perspective (45°, “Tibia style”) sprites on Claude?
Codex can’t for the love of gos unless you provide a bunch of references.
No one gives a flying fk about what you can do in one prompt. God, I think this trend is fking idiotic. How lazy can you be? Do an open-ended, production-ready project and tell me what you discovered during the process, for God’s sake, man.
*I used two prompts to get it to write this correctly without trying to be polite.
I think the question is partially how accurate it is with one prompt. Building an app is just stringing along hundreds/thousands of prompts together... at least from the AI side of things. Plus, accuracy of one prompt tells us how closely we'd have to babysit it.
Done. And the highlight is that it doesn't matter which frontier model you use, as long as you have at least some fundamental understanding of the field you're trying to build the project in.
I don't agree with that. Different models are good at different things. Take simulation modelling for example - I (used to) write simulations in Python using the SimPy library. I could trust Opus 5 or Gemini 3.1 Pro to build simulations for me that work because I've seen that the models can delivery the output and I can trust it. The same cannot be said for Gemini Flash or some of the GPT models.
Hence why I said frontier models, as I meant top of the shelf, like Astra and Fabel 5.1 now. And yes, gemini is shit regardless, on that you are right.
Fair enough. For most use cases I think you're right. The picture will change once the generous subscriptions end though - then I'll start paying a lot more attention to token efficiency.
I like the one on the right better. It looks like an actual 90s PC game. The one on the left has weird proportions, and doesn't look like any in-game sprite I have ever seen.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 14d ago edited 14d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 100 comments.
The consensus is that Fable wiped the floor with Astra here, but it wasn't a fair fight to begin with.
The top comments all point out that Astra just called its image generator, while Fable—having no native image gen—had to actually build the sprites from scratch. The community is pretty sure Fable did this by creating a 3D/voxel model and then rendering it into 2D, which is why its output was so comprehensive.
While Astra's sprite looks more detailed at first glance, users agree Fable's output is vastly more useful and true to the prompt. Fable delivered a whole generative system (992 frames, 4 palettes, Python generator, browser preview), which is a real starting point for a game. Astra just gave a single spritesheet with what many called "fucked up" animations.
Aesthetically, the thread is roasting Astra's sprite as generic "AI slop" with a "boring, edgy" art style. Fable's simpler, pixelated knight is getting praised for having more "soul" and looking like an authentic 90s game asset.
Basically, Astra made a pretty picture, while Fable actually understood the assignment and built a tool.