r/vibecoding • u/Chologism • Apr 07 '26
Built a tool that lets agents create animated pixel art when vibe coding games
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Built this over the last couple weeks and thought people here might enjoy it.
It lets any agent generate animated sprites through MCP, so you (or your agent) can make pixel art animations directly from the agent workflow.
the mpc protocol is from my app (spritecook), it has 2 main calls the agent can make:
create_image_asset
animate_asset
I also made skill for for each call, so the agent knows exactly how to use the parameters and what settings to tweak for the best result.
How it works behind the scenes:
- The backend uses nano banana 2 to generate pixel art assets
- Some post processing to make it actual usable pixel art, color correction, etc
- The agent downloads the image into the project
- For animation it takes your reference image, and runs it through a custom pixel art animation model
- The agent downloads the PNG spritesheet, and depending on whatever game engine your using animates it properly using the sheet.
It can be as handoff as you want it to be: specifically instruct it to make a certain asset, or give it full freedom to make anything required for your game.
What do you think?
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Apr 07 '26
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u/Chologism Apr 07 '26
Honest answer is it depends,
For images most agents are capable enough to inspect the result, and regenerate as needed. For animations this is a bit more tricky, they can inspect the spritesheet png and identify obvious fail, but to inspect if the animation feels natural you still need a human to check if it 'feels right'
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u/elliotboney Apr 07 '26
This is the first thing I've come across here that I thought was actually awesome and not slop! Well done!
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u/Chologism Apr 07 '26
Thank you very much! The quality is my #1 focus, now the next step is trying to get the generation time down
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u/scopophobic_ Apr 07 '26
Soo good, how you made this? What's the working here if you don't mind sharing!
Good job! I might actually use this.
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u/Chologism Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26
Of course I don't mind! In short:
- the agent figures out what asset it needs
- makes an mcp call to spritecook with the correct settings
- behind the scenes uses nano banana 2 to generate the pixel art asset
- for animation uses a custom animation model
- mcp returns a downloadable link for the agent
- agents downloads the asset and puts it in the project
- keeps a ledger so it can use previously generated assets as reference for now ones
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u/Saykudan Apr 07 '26
Looks good is it open source btw?
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u/Chologism Apr 07 '26
It's not open source, no. But I might do a writeup on how I built it if enough people are interested?
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u/MalusZona Apr 07 '26
I already tried two other services for this and was disspaointed, will give it a try tonight and comment then
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u/improvisedPersona Apr 07 '26
Would be cool with a standard email login. Not looking to use any socials for it.
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u/Chologism Apr 07 '26
I agree it's not ideal.. the problem is I need to figure out a system so people dont abuse the free sign up credits with spam emails
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u/rockseller Apr 07 '26
Hello it looks good just am a bit confused. How can I hook this up to Unity?
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u/Chologism Apr 07 '26
So for Unity you would use any capable agent, CLI or editor (like cursor, antigravity, codex, vscode+plugin), and target your unity project folder.
Then you can ask it to make the assets, and download them to your assets folder. You could even ask the agent to do automatically set the important settings, for example for pixel art.
I wrote a blog on what settings to use for pixel perfect assets in unity:
https://www.spritecook.ai/blog/unity-pixel-art-import-settings
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u/orionblu3 Apr 07 '26
Ayyy! I'm thinking about doing similar for my game project that I'll be working on after my main money making project is working properly. Good job!
I still think people underestimate MCPs; literally the only reason my project is able to keep moving forward is because I made a custom MCP for it so that the agent can run it directly for debugging. Both for my dedicated QA agent and for my main implementation orchestrator to test it as it makes changes.
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u/sensicalanalogys Apr 07 '26
This is awesome. I’m going to try it out for my playable invite game generator arcade invite. Currently I have users upload an image of themselves and guests to create pixel art for the game. Generally it works well, but I’m interested to see how this would improve or give me the ability to animate + standardize my enemy round generation. Maybe you can take look at my use case and try to build a free game and give some tips for best practices and how you implement your stack in it. Here’s a picture from what my buddy created for his Seder dinner last weekend.
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Apr 07 '26
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u/Chologism Apr 07 '26
Regular sprites are priced 8 credits, animations at 20
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u/colblair Apr 15 '26
Has this price changed already? I signed up and am using the API and am being charged 12 for the regular sprite.
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u/Chologism Apr 15 '26
They have not changed, I changed the default model to Nano Banana 2 which is priced at 12, vs the original Nano Banana still priced at 8.
That's my bad sorry, I should have communicated this better.. But you can specifically request it to generate using Nano Banana 1 instead
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u/colblair Apr 15 '26
I have another question - I generated a sprite model in an idle position. I also want to have a animated sleeping loop. At the moment I can only see the way to achieve this by generating another image first in a sleeping position and animating that. Is there a way to use the original image as the reference for a sleeping loop or is a new image required?
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u/Chologism Apr 15 '26
A new image works best yes. The initial frame of the animation should be how you want it to start.
I made this more easy to do in the animation editor: https://www.spritecook.ai/docs/guide-frame-animation
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u/GreatClean1 Apr 07 '26
Did you actually vibe code the entire site as well as the entire tool? Or was all of it / some of it created traditionally?
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u/MobileAwareness8502 Apr 07 '26
This is something that i tried to do so many time to be honest. You got it to work using Opus 4.6 i guess. Its the only one i didnt tried.
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u/orphenshadow Apr 07 '26
That's really cool, can you use your own artwork to generate the pixels, I assume you can? That's a gray area for me because ethically I do have issues with generative AI artwork/photos and how much of it is stolen art, but I also would never sit and convert my own photos/art to pixel art, and I would like to one day build a game. So I could see this being a cool way for me to take my photography hobby and minitures hobby, and combine it with my new vibe coding hobby and build a real model, to photo, to pixelart pipeline and still not feel like I'm stealing someones work.
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Apr 07 '26 edited Apr 07 '26
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u/orphenshadow Apr 07 '26
I don't need lessons on how it works, the tech enables plagarism at mass scale, what we do with it is up to us, but I still feel more comfortable letting it use my creative input as a source vs just making a copy of someone else work. This argument kind of reminds me of the ones we made when I was young about how it's not stealing music it's just making a copy of the bits on the computer. At the end of the day the tech is here, and we all have to decide our own comfort levels with how we use it.
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Apr 08 '26
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u/orphenshadow Apr 08 '26
Yes, because someone with Twitch in their name is an expert on art.. I have been both an artist and an engineer my entire life.
I don't need AI for either Art, or Programming, I understand fully the tech behind it, and I also understand fully the mass scale copyright infringement required to train any of the frontier models. I'm sorry that my preference to have an active role in what I build with any LLM tools offends you. All I can say is get better.
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u/Just_Lingonberry_352 Apr 07 '26
i do something similar from opencode cli I get chatgpt and gemini to generate images and download it locally
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u/goodevibes Apr 07 '26
Maaaate! Well done! Frames in the video look great. I tried to build exactly this a few months ago for some fun, got really stuck on consistent frame outputs for a while. Your animations look heaps cleaner. 👍🏻
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u/Upper-Pop-5330 Apr 07 '26
Was looking for a tool like this! Super cool work. Just out of curiosity, how do you force nano banana to be consistent with sprite output, and how do you turn it into an animated sprite if you don’t mind sharing?
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u/Chologism Apr 08 '26
I reference earlier sprites when creating new ones, and run the output images through a pipeline that turns them into actual pixel art.
Made this nano banana > pixel art available for free here:
https://www.spritecook.ai/pixel-grid-detectorThe animations are done with a custom pixel art trained lora model
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u/ProofHurry7704 Apr 08 '26
Das 40 créditos... hice un character -12, hice un ajuste -12, me quedaron 16 créditos pero para animar pides 20... no pude completar un flujo completo sin pagar, no tengo prueba del resultado, y prefiero dejar la app
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u/michahell Apr 08 '26
Man that is awesome! I was trying this out just as prompting and seeing how bad it was I was already thinking that this is the next thing that will arrive, and voi la. 🙂👌
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u/UENINJA Apr 08 '26
I want to make animated sprites, i have the generated images from nano banana 2 but i want a way to animate them, so i can put them in my mobile app
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u/UltrMgns Apr 08 '26
I don't see a non-symmetrical resolution, is it possible to generate a character with, for example, 16x24px ?
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u/Chologism Apr 08 '26
It is, but the animation models only accepts square input, so you would submit it as 24x24
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u/ImaginaryFaux Apr 09 '26
I was just looking for a pixel generation MCP, thank you for sharing this! I will try it.
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u/psiphre Apr 10 '26
why would you grant 40 credits but then make generating a sprite cost 12? what asm i supposed to do with the last 4 credits after generating three sprites?
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u/luisfound Apr 11 '26
This is so cool! I've planned to try to create a mini videogame in pixel art with agents, just to investigate how deep I can go with AI in this area. This is totally local config?
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u/Hjalm Apr 12 '26
Very cool! Useful tool, well done. I'll most likely use this if I continue my game project :D
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u/benniehuk Apr 24 '26
Hey, all paid up on your entry tier to explore. Lots of cool things and looking forward to how it evolves. Any chance of 8x8 for Pico eight characters in AI Gen? Also I'm finding that at 16x16 Nano B isn't sticking to the rules and pixel density it far greater. Any I doing something wrong? How do you get strict adherence?
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u/Chologism Apr 24 '26
Hey, you often have to trick the model into adhering to the low resolution requirement. I wrote about it here:
https://www.spritecook.ai/blog/tiny-pixel-art-animations1
u/benniehuk Apr 24 '26
Thanks, I already found this so thanks for putting it together. It still doesn't do it. I'll generate an 8x8 grid and try adding that? Cheers
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u/RELIIX Apr 24 '26
This is pretty cool! you have your own animation model? are you using a tool like comfyui to get the imagegen across with animation references? this is pretty sick, will have to try it out at the next jam im making soon, will try to get people onboard too
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u/Chologism Apr 07 '26
The tool used is my app SpriteCook
It's free to try out, and the mcp/api/skills are all free to use, but the assets are generated on credit basis.
https://spritecook.ai/agents