Show HN: AI game animation sprite generator

77 lyogavin 57 6/6/2025, 7:30:29 PM godmodeai.cloud ↗
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!

Comments (57)

Cloudef · 29m ago
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.
palmfacehn · 4h ago
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 · 3h ago
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.

doctorpangloss · 12h ago
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 · 6h ago
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 · 6h ago
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 · 5h ago
sorry for the inconvenience.

I've fixed it.

ALso given your account 2x more credits.

taytus · 1h ago
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 · 5h ago
checking
bitwize · 9h ago
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.
elpocko · 12h ago
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.

okkdev · 3h ago
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...
miohtama · 2h ago
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 · 2h ago
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 · 1h ago
> I will never

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

highway900 · 10h ago
> 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.

iandanforth · 12h ago
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?
kevingadd · 5h ago
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 · 3h ago
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.

imatworkyo · 10h ago
This is awesome, good luck with this tool. Can it do isometric and top down views?
lyogavin · 7h ago
working on adding those
educasean · 12h ago
The example sprites aren't loading for me. I see original panda and the female ninja graphics, but the 6 sprite boxes are empty.
lyogavin · 10h ago
thanks for letting me know. I'll put some CDN to the videos.
imetatroll · 9h ago
I would like to know what sort of AI is trained to do this.
9283409232 · 12h ago
It's cool but you can tell the sprites are low quality and AI generated. They have that trademark AI "fuzziness." It's possible that players would think it is a design choice but it is noticable.
lyogavin · 10h ago
will add a quality upscale model to fix it. thanks.
ofjcihen · 12h ago
You wouldn’t happen to have vibe coded this would you? I can’t get a response from multiple pages.
thrance · 4h ago
The samples on the landing page are... not good, by any metric. The background jitters, details go missing from frame to frame, and the animations that should cycle (run, walk...) don't look like they do.

This is a prototype, at best. I would be ashamed of asking money for providing such a sloppy service.

Also, in your faq you have "You own the rights to your generated content.", which I don't think is true. AFAIK, you can't copyright AI art.

mclau157 · 12h ago
really the space for 16x16 sprites with AI has not been done very well so far
Dwedit · 11h ago
miaomiaoPixel_v11 can generate sprites that small. Specify a size of 128x128, and that corresponds to an actual size of 16x16. Use an image editor to shrink the sprite down to 16x16, then reduce the palette as needed to remove the near-matching colors.

16x24 sprites end up looking a lot nicer though.

Madmallard · 6h ago
I'm surprised posts like this aren't instantaneously flagged and removed. The tools for doing this are readily available for free as it is.

This is basically another "throw AI in it" CRUD app that wants your money. They're all really low effort grifts that do not deserve to see the light of day.

They work for a subset of animations that go in commonplace game types. Anything creative or new or different? No chance you'll get a satisfactory result. They are all subtly wrong in ways that anyone can easily spot and will likely get your game filtered out and harshly criticized publically on Steam or other platforms.

This right here too is so egregious: https://www.godmodeai.cloud/plans

banner520 · 8h ago
I operated for 30 minutes, but it didn't achieve the result I wanted
DrSiemer · 12h ago
Settings page does not work. Profile page does not work. I've been waiting for my first test for 30 minutes now. Not a great first impression...
lyogavin · 4h ago
fixed setting and profile.

sorry for the long waiting, I didn't thought there would be so many requests. Added more powerful GPUs.

huhtenberg · 12h ago
Curious idea, but doesn't seem to working for me. It's been sitting in "Your job is in queue" state for 10 minutes, and that's it. Reloaded the page just now and it just reset itself.
lyogavin · 10h ago
sorry, I didn't expect so many requests all queued up too long. I've added some servers it should start to process.

When your request finish it'll send you an email notification.

genewitch · 8h ago
Three things are known. Slashdot and HN effect and the gervais effect.

Don't really get the mean-spirited comments. Not everyone has the means to exascale their project.

WithinReason · 13h ago
Hope someone makes a celebrity Mortal Kombat game from this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjYfFDvtZ5s
doublerabbit · 13h ago
The privacy pages and legal pages don't link. They all return to the homepage.

Without them I am hesitant in uploading my concept art from my project for testing.

Otherwise it is a cool concept and I would potentially look in to if it turns out you don't go all evil villain and claim ownership over the sprites.

Enabling a preview set of sprites without having an account would do no harm neither.

But creating an account without any legal documentation is a no from me as I don't know whats happening with my IP which leaves me uncomfortable.

Even if it's not a ratified legal document; some draft is better than nothing.

lyogavin · 10h ago
sorry, just fixed it.