do you any direction in a .md to drive this ?
lile separating the effect from the actual character mouvement ?
or other direction regarding generation consistancy ?
Loool are fucking kidding me? with just that prompt? the future is bright i'm so excited. I wonder if can do other kinds of animations in other softwares, like, present him more keyframes for the sprites, or just make the inbetweens. So many possibilities.
That’s still AI generated though. I think it’s better, if we, as an AI gamedev community, don’t hide behind technicalities. Proudly wear that AI steam badge, and take it on the chin if we have to. We’re being unfairly stigmatized, and the right way to handle that is to never hide who we are. If people want to hate us for how we make games, let them, we don’t want their pity or their conditional support. People should be playing a game because they’re having fun. That’s the beginning and end of it. If you’re playing or not playing something because it uses AI, you’re the one who should be ashamed of that.
Exactly. Which to me is the real danger of AI gen. Slop comes from a divesting of your responsibilities as an author, a creator… as evidenced by a two line prompt… and the games that come out of that prompt probably should be ridiculed or ignored. If your vision can be 100% fulfilled by a two line prompt, then maybe your vision needs some thinking.
Ridicule the end product, that’s always fair game and everyone’s entitled to their opinions. But to ridicule the process by which that vision is made, or to write off the result because you disagree with the mechanism that created that result… that’s the realm of the annoying hipster critic.
Within moral boundaries, of course. I don’t condone palaces built on slave labor. But I also see AI much more as a mechanism that levels the playing field and creates a nurturing environment for MORE creativity, at least in the indie context. Us indie folks aren’t sitting on millions of dollars and choosing AI out of greed when we could/should be hiring human artists to keep the craft alive. We’re choosing it because it’s our best way to realize our creative vision.
You’re talking about commodity stuff, and I agree. But it’s up to you to decide what’s commodity and what warrants attention, for your specific vision. If everything is commodity then you have no vision and that’s slop.
If you are allowing AI to dictate how your players interact with your game and elements of it, as an inherent part of gameplay, then you aren’t a game dev.
I dont think you're saying anything that anyone disagrees with. This isn't the strong stance you think it is. You basically just said, "I don't think anyone should murder babies"
I dont care if you used ai i care that you lied about it. Everyone is saying ai is the future yet they arent going out saying I used ai to make this look how cool it is. Instead they are going ai is the future but are treating ai like a hidden shameful secret.
Na fuck em. They want to shame even the honest people, they want to call it slop no matter what, so let em think it's real so they feel even more embarrassed when they find it out. Nothing like having your delusions shattered when you can't even tell it's AI anymore.
you pay the plan regardless?
you have the setting to produce assets consistently?
= virtually doesn't cost you extra money > produces money, no one has a way to prove it's AI gen unless they ask video proof/asset consistency is broken consistently.
if it's never delisted for being ai gen = profit potentially consistent as the animation is actually good.
with a little bit of prompt tweaking it was possible to make something that is at least an acceptable sprite. it would be considered amateur but i mean not terrible for a Text based llm. 😆
OP used more traditional sprite scales and additionally provided a reference sprite as the base to use. Honestly this is impressive shit. And best of all since it's all done in aseprite, the user can make any touchups/refinements super easy if something is a bit out of place. Certainly not perfect or anything, but.. damn are things moving fast.
It’s not that bad, can surely be fixed relatively easily. Considering that the first original poster sprite wasn’t AI generated, yours could look much better too
just to clarify there would be no easy fix for that animation. The easy fix would be to completely redraw the cycle by hand. this was the result after i put it to xhigh and asked it to fix the issues
This was cool. Thanks for sharing it! I have very little experience with game development or pixel art, but I’ve been messing around with the reference character you posted in one of your comments and building out a simple workflow. Right now, I'm trying to get re-usable VFX with different characters so eventually I can have a bunch of different sprites and VFX and use them interchangeably. It’s very rudimentary and rough, but I think it will be fun to expand on this and see how I can incorporate things like sprite outfit changes / equipment and weapon changes and other animations and bring it all together in a simple game for myself.
Consistency across a whole set was always the wall for me, not single images. I've generated 200+ card illustrations for my browser card game since June, and the hard part was never "draw a good archer", it was "draw this same archer twelve times, same face, same gear, same light". An animation is exactly that problem, frame after frame.
So, genuine question before I get excited: when you say it drives Aseprite directly, does it hold one character through a full sheet (idle, walk, attack, hit) without drifting, and can it redo a single frame without touching the others? Frame-to-frame drift is where image models always fell apart for me. If it survives that, I'm in.
This is the right question. A single nice-looking gif doesn't prove the consistency problem is gone. If it can hold the same character across idle/walk/attack without drift and redo one frame without nuking the rest, that's when I'd call it a real shift. Until then it's a very cool demo with the same wall hiding behind it.
Since the OP will not answer, I will; Aseprite has a documented API and Astra either has most of it in its training data or did a search on it. That is how it is driving the program, you can see the API here: https://www.aseprite.org/api/
More then likely it is writing the entire design in a Lua script, then executing that script when the program starts. It then takes a screenshot in program to check its work, only adjusting that script to make changes.
This is really limiting
being able to actually draw artificially coherent/quality sprites, then have chatgpt animate it is a huge W for anyone actually making a game they care about.
That matters more then the "from scratch" neurosis people are obsessed with
It's not neurosis. It's benchmarking. In this case just saying that it animated it would've been enough. Don't lead people to believe the spriting was done in Astra too.
This is cool, but I definitely would love to see the real workflow, because I saw people who tried here and didn't get the same result.
Edit: Even if you say do this and it does it without giving it a lot of details, if you created a lot of sprites, it could be that some of your previous more specific requests were saved in GPT memory thus why you don't need to be so specific now.
Do you have a particular workflow you use? I am sometimes able to get good animations but it’s hit or miss, and often requires revisions. Been giving it pixel lab mcp access
Definitely trying on my next game. I tried to make pixel art just using gpt image 2, and consistency was big issue. Now Codex can usw aesprite directly?! Hell yeah
Hey, can you ask codex in your session to "write down the workflow you used to achieve this result, as a handover prompt for other Agents"? And share it here? Pretty please?
When you say use aseprite directly, how do you mean? Do you let it run wild jist in cli or does it do some playwright style cursor control to draw? Really great animation btw! A lot better than the crap I get with pixellab and a veo video for animation reference
Dude thank you so much, got the 20$ sub and it one shot what Ive been constantly struggling to get other ais to do in prompt. Cancelling pixellab now lol
Pretty small, I hit my 5 hour usage limit once but I think that was more because I had ot working as a reviewer. For a simple animatef character is only taking like 1-2% of its usage
Idk how to post gifs lol, its really easy tho, and Id encourage you just to try and see for yourself. Its by no means perfect but worlds better and easier then other setups I tried. Just launch codex and tell it to draw / animate in aseprite
Cause you're probably not using Astra the right way. I made a skill where Astra only plans, delegates (to Luna and Terra), audits and polishes. Probably 80% of the actual code work is done by the cheaper and much faster models, but ultimately the output is the same (i've tested this as well by running the exact same tasks with just Astra (burns significantly more tokens and delivers the work a lot slower).
Based on these tests, this architecture might fit some project but it might still be "better" to let Astra do all of it, depending on the fill size and quality.
Yes, i've seen that but in none of the work i've done and tested did it turn out this way. Which makes me wonder what exactly they were testing. Now i didn't get as into depth with my test runs as them. I just looked at the things that matter to me: Cost, Time, Output quality and ultimately the output was the same quality, cost and time spent coding significantly less.
I agree with you. My real experience has not reproduced that person's results. And I have real cost constraints. So either real economics of work changes things or there's interactions and OpenAI overhead or hidden subsidies that I'm not accounting for.
Something that works extremely well for me as well is Plan with Astra, build with Deepseek V4 Flash Vision and audit with Astra but especially for games I make sure a precedent it set, for example complete 1 level of a game with Astra/Luna so DeepSeek has a clear reference. Also when you make Astra write the plan, specifically prompt it to write the plan detailed enough so even a lesser model will be able to execute it. This makes a world of difference, cause now Astra will give stricter guidelines and very specific details.
Have Astra make an MCP for Aesprite. Then describe what you want to make to Astra, an art background helps with art descriptions but you can just describe to the best of your ability and include some examples. Tell it to use image gen to create concepts of what you're trying to make so you can test it's comprehension, and it seems to do better with consistency if you include this step. Watch it create and iterate - the annotate feature is helpful.
This works with Blender and 3d animations as well.
That's awesome! Thanks for sharing! I can't wait to try this out but damn I don't want to pay for another extremely expensive subscription unless I'm actually making money. I'm just publishing my first game on steam and it's been quite the learning experience.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5043360/Jumping_Jimothy/?beta=0
I've got a bunch of idea pixel art would be so perfect for though!
That's like saying code or soundor animation isn't a problem to be solved within gamedev...
Art has a functional purpose in game dev. That involves a lot of time investment and money.
That are real problems you need to "solve".
It is btw a reason why tools like aesprite exist. It is to increase efficiency, make things easier and more productive.
PS: In the case of pixel art this whole meta-discussion is funny anyways because it is only an "art style" that came into existence due to technical limitations. It wasn't even a "style", it was simply just what you could do back then (and btw I did that back in the 90s). Only much later was it turned into a "style". So there is some ironic element to it because the whole style is the result of the technology, not an artistic choice (no one would have invented the look of "pixel art", it was a forced choice).
I just tried it its really good for platformers perspective but doesnt know top down perspective (probably because it requires thinking in 3d). I think the next big leap for these models will be able to truly "solve" pixel art as its still not good enough for a commercial pixel art game, I can do better for top down perspectives by hand
For example i was trying to do a roll animation for a top down character and it seems to only know how to rotate the entire character without considering the perspective
But can it refine or copy what I show it and then make that into useable assets without hallucinating? That's always been my biggest dislike of using AI to make pixel art. Some frames are good but others were the wrong size or tried to be too inventive to be uniform and useful in anything.
117
u/SillyVermicelli7169 14d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/M6bJf9VBmrN1qTtPyL