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Show HN: AI game animation sprite generator

Show HN: AI game animation sprite generator

75 comments

·June 6, 2025

I tried to build AI game animation generator last year ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40395221), a lot of people were interested, but it failed, mainly because the technology was not good enough.

1 year passed, there were a lot of developments in video/image generation. I tried it again, I think it works super well now. Actually beyond my expectation.

You can generate all kinds of game character animation sprites with only 1 image.

1, upload your image of your character 2, choose the action you want 3, generate!

Support basic actions like Run, Jump, Punch and complicated ones like: Shoryuken, Spinning kick, etc.

High quality sprite sheet will be directly generated to use in Unity and any game engine.

If you are an indie game developer, you don't need to high an artist or animator to develop you game.

For studios, it's 10x cost saving and 10x efficiency as no more creating animations for 100 NPCs 100 times.

Please check it out, looking forward to your feedback!

nkrisc

It’s sad how the existing corpus of artists’ works are being used against them.

The only reason this can generate images like these is because artists previously created artwork like this. And then in return they get:

> you don't need to high an artist or animator to develop you game.

Unless you created all the training material yourself, any model like this is highly unethical, in my opinion.

Aeolun

Unless you didn’t want people to see and use it, maybe you shouldn’t have made it public? I don’t think training AI is fundamentally different from humans learning from things they see, and we don’t restrict that either.

wrasee

The fundamental difference is that computers can do this at a pace and scale that humans could never aspire to. There is a natural limit to the extent a single individual can be informed by previous works. It sets a natural pace to innovation that is sustainable for both the artist and derivative works.

Computers have no such limitation. I think that alone is enough to say that yes, it is fundamentally different.

palmfacehn

Great progress. Bookmarked.

For purposes of generative worlds, I have an additional requirement for interchangable equipment and weapons. I.e. a single sword or armor sprite should fit with all humanoid characters, in all animations. I suspect this could be achieved by training against "clipping" tests.

As a start, there should be projections for all four cardinal directions.

Limit the output to palettes of a given size, for classic recolors via GL shaders.

lyogavin

Thanks for so many valuable points and ideas. Will do.

I like the "interchangable equipment and weapons." idea, very cool. And yes. it's doable. many ways possible could work. I'll experiment.

Cloudef

Not sure about professional quality. All the results seem to need quite bit of hand editing to look good. Also the examples only show animations ripped from street fighter.

doctorpangloss

There is a lot of negativity on Hacker News.

Staying focused: the panda is wearing gloves, but then when it does the Hadouken and the Hurrican Kicks, it loses the gloves.

Bigger picture this seems like a focus on product stuff like pricing and demos and navbars that don't really matter to artists or game developers. Your feelings are correct that people here - the root motivation of the negativity - are questioning your sincerity. With AI art this is acutely true, people don't view AI art as a sincere art endeavor. I don't doubt your sincerity. But spending more time on the art thing, and making it free or open source, it's going to look and feel more authentic.

themanmaran

I think the negativity is overkill.

I've been toying around with the exact same idea the last couple weeks. It's mostly GPT 4o image => some image cleanup, but honestly a lot more finicky than I originally expected. Lots of prompt engineering. So OP probably put in a fair bit of effort here.

Also each animation probably costs $1-$2 in GPT costs to make [1], so not something that's easy to throw a free tier on.

[1] https://openai.com/api/pricing/#:~:text=Image%20Generation%2...

bigcat12345678

Hmm The payment link does not require login And I paid and the credits vanished into thin air ...

To the poster, please find the customer service to fix

https://buy.stripe.com/cNicN59Bqf6K4q92Qrbwk00?prefilled_ema...

Also, I cannot find my queuing job after closing the page.

lyogavin

sorry for the inconvenience.

I've fixed it.

ALso given your account 2x more credits.

taytus

Shouldn’t it be more like 5x credits? That’s what I would have given to a paying early adopter dealing with these annoying issues.

lyogavin

checking

sambeau

This is so depressing.

Also, why does the female ninja suddenly grow a penis?

null

[deleted]

elpocko

What model(s) does this use? Is it built using open source models and tools? I couldn't find any mention of models in the FAQ (who even asked those questions?) or elsewhere. I doubt you trained your own diffusion model.

The GitHub cat in the footer does not link to GitHub either.

bitwize

Hand-drawn animation, whether for video games or television or other media, is one of those artistic fields where I can see AI being a huge win for everybody. The reason why is because drawing the in-betweens in an animation is tedious, time-consuming, costly, and, in most 2D animation productions, outsourced to sweatshops abroad. And yet it's most of the work that goes into an animation. I think most animators would rather just do the keyframes and leave the tweens in the hands of the machine. It'd make traditional animation as easy and fast as Flash animation, and create a flourishment of even more indie animations from solo creators with even higher quality.

highway900

> This isn't putting anyone out of work. The games simply would not be made in the first place.

The opposite is also true. Games that should never be made are being made due to the rubbish that can be generated by these tools. Observe the generated samples on the landing page, they are literally just copying street fighter. These tools are so useless without ripping off the hard work of humans. The deluge of slop is a signal to noise problem.

okkdev

I hate this. It's cool that it's possible, but I hate it. Generating art solves no real problem and only suppresses a struggling profession without which this wouldn't even be possible...

Aeolun

I think the problem is that the profession is struggling because you pay a lot of money for work that is often of very dubious quality.

I can’t ask a anyone that claims to be a pixel artist for sprites because the chance of getting garbage is just too high.

Btw, if anyone does know someone good, I’m open to paying xD

yreg

> Generating art solves no real problem

It definitely does solve a problem. This tool provides affordable custom sprites with fast delivery.

If it didn't solve any problem there would be zero demand for it and no reason for you to care about it.

miohtama

The problem is that in the indie game market, where most 2d sprites are drawn, there is not enough money going around making many studios profitable. By reducing cost of manual 2d animation, more studios can be profitable and able to deliver better, more finished, games. Then studios can pay decent salaries to employees.

makerofthings

Have to agree. I don’t think we should stop ai progress, just that I think we built a bad thing along the way. I will never buy a video game that I know has ai generated content, I want to see some art, not a soulless prediction of what art might look like.

petesergeant

> I will never

Bet you $10 that in five years' time you will have.

iandanforth

All AI tools I've tried have failed to generate animations for slimes in my experiments. (Including Veo3) I'm hesitant to even try this, any chance it would work?

Aeolun

I really want to see an example with a slime. I’m sure it’d butcher it, but it would be so funny.

kevingadd

You're going to have a much harder time getting good animations generated for something that isn't a humanoid, since the training sets won't have much to work from. It's possible with a really good prompt for 'slime' you could get something but this doesn't seem to allow prompt customization.

If you're after monsters like slimes I would not drop money on this.

Madmallard

Lol it's not functional for most things.

I uploaded a photo of a pixel art electrician and it just completely ruins it and looks nothing like my guy and forces it into a particular style where it looks like a cheap mobile game playable ad and somehow Mario at the same time. Not to mention, the actual animation is wrong too.