Sprite Generation

Describe what you need and PIXL draws it, or import any AI-generated pixel art image and reconstruct it as a clean, game-ready tile.

The pipeline

Every step is automatic. You provide a text prompt and get back a palette-constrained PAX tile.

From text to pixel art

Tell PIXL what you want:

pixl generate-sprite tileset.pax \
  --prompt "wizard with purple hat and staff" \
  --name wizard \
  --out wizard.png

How each step works

Pixel grid detection

AI images look like pixel art but are rendered at 1024×1024. Each "art pixel" is actually a 20-40px block. PIXL scans for this repeating grid and finds the real resolution — usually 24-32 pixels.

Center-sampling

Instead of blurry Lanczos downscaling, PIXL picks the center pixel of each block. No smeared edges, no anti-aliasing artifacts.

Background removal

AI generators often add glowing halos around sprites, even when asked for transparency. PIXL flood-fills from the image corners to detect and strip these automatically.

Palette extraction

The dominant colors are pulled from the image using median-cut quantization. The actual darkest pixel (for outlines) and lightest pixel (for highlights) are always preserved — they won't get averaged away.

Anti-aliasing cleanup

Stray blended pixels between color regions get snapped to their nearest clean neighbor. The result is crisp pixel art, not a soft downscale.

Outline enforcement

Any boundary pixel that's too light gets darkened. This ensures the sprite has a readable silhouette — the single most important quality rule in pixel art.

Import your own images

Already have AI-generated pixel art from Midjourney, DALL-E, or Stable Diffusion?

pixl convert wizard.png --width 32 --colors 32

PIXL detects the pixel grid, samples cleanly, strips the background, extracts a palette, and outputs a true 32×32 sprite with 32 indexed colors.

Palette management

Auto-extracted palette

Every generated sprite comes with a palette in PAX format — copy it into your .pax file:

[palette.auto]
"." = "#00000000"
"#" = "#1a1020ff"
"a" = "#4a3668ff"
"b" = "#6a5090ff"

Remap to your project palette

When you're ready to integrate, remap auto-extracted colors to your project palette. PIXL uses perceptual color matching (OKLab) to find the closest color for each symbol.

Backed by real pixel art knowledge

PIXL doesn't wing it. It pulls from a built-in knowledge base of pixel art techniques — dithering patterns, shading rules, palette theory, retro hardware constraints. The AI knows that 16×16 characters need strong silhouettes and that outlines should be the darkest palette color.

Quality checks included

Every generated sprite is automatically analyzed. See Art Direction for the full quality system.