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AI Pixel Art & Tile Map Generator

A game developer toolkit for AI-generated pixel art, tile maps, sprite-sheet animations, and other game graphic assets — packaged as a Claude Code skill on top of OpenAI or Azure AI Foundry (gpt-image-2) and Google Gemini 2.5 Flash Image. Outputs are Tiled-compatible (TSX/TMJ) so sprites and tilesets drop straight into your map editor.

Cat wizard sprite

Sprite — 128×128, aap64 palette

Knight sprite

Sprite — 128×128, db32 palette

Overworld tileset

Seamless tileset — 4×32px tiles, db32

Knight walk cycle

Animation — 4-frame walk cycle, 3 fps

What it does

Two modes:

  1. General image generation — text-to-image via gpt-image-2 on OpenAI/Azure.
  2. Pixel-art game-asset mode — OpenAI/Azure generation → nearest-neighbor downscale → named-palette quantize → (for animations) Gemini 2.5 Flash Image reference-based frame consistency → TSX/TMJ export for Tiled.

The skill ships deterministic QA metrics for every pipeline, with hard gates on palette fidelity, alpha crispness, tile seam continuity, and walk-cycle alignment.

Quick start

Let Claude Code install it

Paste this into a Claude Code session and it will clone the skill, install dependencies, and walk you through credential setup:

Quickstart prompt

Install the ai-pixel-art-image-generation skill from https://github.com/ianlintner/ai-pixel-art-image-generation into ~/.claude/skills/ai-pixel-art-image-generation, install its Python dependencies, then ask whether I want direct OpenAI or Azure AI Foundry for gpt-image-2, and ask for the Gemini API key if I want animations. Don't assume — check which auth path I'm using (OPENAI_API_KEY, az login, DefaultAzureCredential, or a static AZURE_OPENAI_API_KEY), tell me which shell rc file to export the env vars in, and verify the install by generating a small sprite with --qa.

Manual install

pip install openai azure-identity google-genai pillow rembg onnxruntime
# Direct OpenAI:
export OPENAI_API_KEY="<your-openai-api-key>"
# Or Azure AI Foundry:
export AZURE_OPENAI_ENDPOINT="https://<your-foundry-resource>.cognitiveservices.azure.com/"
export GEMINI_API_KEY="<your-gemini-api-key>"  # only needed for animations

See Install for the full setup, and the Cookbook for recipes with example outputs.

Cookbook

Each recipe shows the example output first, then the command that produced it.

Recipe What you get
Sprite Single pixel-art character with outline and named palette.
Tileset N unique seamless tiles packed into a sheet + Tiled TSX + TMJ.
Animation 2–8 frame sprite-sheet animation + Tiled <animation> block + GIF.
General image Any subject, fixed or flexible gpt-image-2 size.
Pixelize existing Post-process an existing PNG into pixel art.

Reference