Art Direction & Quality
PIXL reviews your sprites automatically and tells you exactly what to fix — not a vague score, but specific notes with row numbers.
The refine loop
Create a sprite. PIXL critiques it. Fix the flagged rows. Re-check. Usually 2-3 rounds to pass. The loop arrow means: repeat until the critique is clean.
What gets checked
Outlines
Does every edge of your sprite have a dark pixel border? At small sizes, outlines are what make pixel art readable. Below 70% coverage triggers a warning.
Centering
Is your character in the middle of the tile, or drifting to a corner? Off-center sprites waste canvas space.
Canvas use
Is the sprite filling the space? A tiny figure in a big empty tile means wasted resolution.
Contrast
Can you tell adjacent parts apart? Hair from face, armor from cloth. Low contrast makes everything look like one blob.
Fragmentation
Are there floating pixels disconnected from the main body? Usually AA artifacts or stray marks.
Pixel density
How filled is the tile? Reported for reference — not enforced, since some tiles are intentionally sparse.
Fix instructions, not just scores
When something's off, PIXL doesn't just say "low quality." It tells you:
Only 67% of boundary pixels are dark — outline is incomplete. Fill gaps in the silhouette border. Outline gaps found at rows: 3, 7, 12.
Specific enough to act on immediately.
Severity levels
| Level | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Error | Fundamentally broken — no outline, tiny subject | Regenerate the tile |
| Warning | Fixable issues — weak outline, off-center | Patch specific rows with pixl_refine_tile |
| Info | Metric reported, no action needed | Read and move on |
It remembers what you like
Accept a tile and PIXL notes the style. Reject one and it learns why. Over time, it builds a profile of your preferences — density, shading direction, color count. New tiles are pre-screened against your profile before you see them.
See Style Learning for the full style system.
CLI usage
pixl critique tileset.pax --tile wizard
The critique command exits with code 1 on errors — use it in CI to catch quality regressions before they ship.
Works on everything
The quality system runs the same checks whether you painted the tile by hand, generated it with AI, or imported it from Aseprite. Same standards, same feedback.