If you use the editing capabilities and send in a grid of 32×32 cells on a 1024×1024 image, you can get it to flood-fill in each square, so you end up with properly aligned 32×32 tiles. Then you can squash it via nearest neighbor to pull the lines back out, and reduce the palette using something like unfake.js:
This is 100% true for artists. But I am not an artist, and I like pixel art stylistically. So when I make sites or games, I need to either: use my bad art, hire someone on fiverr, or use AI.
Not OP and I won't dispute your point exactly but I'd like to point to a book called Pixel Logic wherein the author makes the same point regarding pixel art. Even though you'll be using stuff like the Lasso and Paint Bucket tools the big thing about pixel art is the manual control and precision of pixel placement (by hand) where you employ techniques like anti aliasing (again by hand). Advanced techniques like sub-pixeling when doing animation frames are another thing that makes sense only when you can place pixels one by one.
I have really struggled to get nano banana to follow size/proportion ratios for sprite art. any tips? I fed in a bunch of examples first and tried to write a really strict prompt. I wonder if any of the sw being discussed here can be programmatically controlled by claude code or similar to do sprite work
Like the comment above I split sprite sheets into grids with edges for NBP to follow. I have the option to add the canny edge map to the grid to enforce a lot of consistency as well. Then I specifically tailor the prompt to the task.
That’s probably fair which is why I tried to be upfront that this is shilling. I figure some people might be like me, interested in sprites but not artsy enough to make them. You might start with an ai sprite and fix it via LibreSprite or another tool.
But isn't it normal for people who work on AI stuff to use LLMs for everything? They are very enthusiastic about AI so naturally they'll use it on everything they can.
That’s a bit reductive. Some do, others don’t. I do a lot of AI development, and building. But I value the act of writing for clarifying my thoughts. And I value other people’s time when reading my writing.
What gives you the sense that the piece was written by an LLM? I would agree that the diagrams have some of the artifacts common in Nano Banana output, but what tips you off about the text?
Em dashes in every other sentence. I've never seen an actual person do that. The language in general reads exactly it's written by an LLM:
"The blah blah didn't just start as blah. It started as blah..."
"First came blah -- blah blah blah"
"And now: blah"
It's a distinctly AI writing style. I do wonder if we'll get to a point where people start writing this way just because it's what they're used to reading. Or maybe LLMs will get better at not writing like this before that happens.
I'm sick and tired of the "No..., no ..., (just) ..." LLM construction. It's everywhere now, you can't open a social media platform and get bombarded by it. This article is full of it.
I get it, I should focus just on the content and whether or not an LLM was used to write it, but the reaction to it is visceral now.
I wasn't put off by it. I read the article, got all the information I needed, it was interesting and informative. (In fact, I find the human-written ones more often annoying; most people are not good at writing, and are apt to create huge walls of text, whereas the AI is biased towards making the information easy to consume)
I do agree it is one of those “if I had more time, I would write a shorter letter” situations.
But in this case the piece is wordier than a bad human writer would be. If they want to use ai for writing, so be it, but at least include “concisely” in the prompt.
We have been experimenting with adding Spacetime multi-player to our current threejs app. It was surprisingly easy to build the standalone demo but the full integration obviously is not as straightforward.
I built 8bitsmith.com as a tool to make controlled sprite sheets.
It was an experiment in vibe-coding and controlled asset creation, so pricing is basically a pass-through cost of using Gemini.
I needed some pixel art for a different project, so I made 8BitSmith, a simple pixel art & sprite generator.
I'm expecting it is pretty niche, but animations tend to be very time consuming for people like me, and getting quick sprites that I can drop into a platform is a big time saver.
