AI Chat & Generation

The left panel in Studio connects to an AI assistant for tile generation, quality feedback, and style guidance. Works with Claude, GPT, or any LLM provider.

Setting up

Open Settings (gear icon in the top bar) and configure your AI provider:

  • Anthropic — paste your Claude API key
  • OpenAI — paste your GPT API key
  • Custom — any OpenAI-compatible endpoint

The chat panel activates once a provider is configured.

What you can ask

Generate tiles

"Create a 16x16 dungeon wall tile with stone texture"

The AI generates a PAX character grid, creates the tile in your session, and shows a rendered preview. It uses the active palette and theme constraints automatically.

Generate sprites from images

"Generate a wizard sprite with a purple hat and staff"

Uses the diffusion bridge (DALL-E) to create a reference image, then converts it to clean pixel art with your palette. See Sprite Generation for details.

Critique your art

"Check the quality of my wall tile"

Runs structural validators — outline coverage, centering, contrast, fragmentation — and returns specific fix instructions with row numbers.

Refine tiles

"Fix the outline on rows 3-5 of the wizard tile"

Patches specific rows of the tile grid and re-renders. The AI sees the updated preview and can continue refining.

Create variations

"Make 4 variants of the floor tile with cracks and moss"

Generates controlled mutations of an existing tile while preserving edge compatibility for WFC.

Build maps

"Generate a 12x8 dungeon with a boss room in the southeast"

Creates a WFC map from spatial rules and renders it as a preview.

The SELF-REFINE loop

GenerateRenderCritiqueFix

This loop runs automatically during generation. You see the final result after quality checks have passed.

Style consistency

When you accept or reject tiles, the AI learns your preferences:

  • Accepted tiles → style profile updated (light direction, density, palette usage)
  • Rejected tiles → constraints recorded ("too sparse", "bad edges")
  • Next generation → pre-filtered against your style profile
Tip
You don't need many rounds for this to kick in. After 5-6 accept/reject decisions, the AI noticeably shifts toward your taste — especially for density and palette usage.

Reference images

Before generating, the AI can look at your existing tiles as rendered images — not just text grids. It matches the proportions, shading, and detail level of your existing work.

Using without Studio

The same AI tools are available through the MCP server for Claude Code or any MCP client:

pixl mcp --file tileset.pax

See MCP Tools for the full tool catalog.