Show HN: AI game animation sprite generator (godmodeai.cloud)

162 points by lyogavin ↗ HN
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!

129 comments

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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.

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.
will add a quality upscale model to fix it. thanks.
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?
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.

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.

I really want to see an example with a slime. I’m sure it’d butcher it, but it would be so funny.
The example sprites aren't loading for me. I see original panda and the female ninja graphics, but the 6 sprite boxes are empty.
thanks for letting me know. I'll put some CDN to the videos.
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.
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.

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.

really the space for 16x16 sprites with AI has not been done very well so far
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.

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.

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...
fixed setting and profile.

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

You wouldn’t happen to have vibe coded this would you? I can’t get a response from multiple pages.
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I’m not an expert in this space, but I’ve been buying human-made sprites from https://itch.io/game-assets

Does anyone else have any good recommendations?

Also, I have a capability I'm sure is 100x the OP link. I've explored this space a bit.

https://streamable.com/k5iny8 (2day expiry)

Pretty much any character or animation.

I don't feel compelled to share unless anyone in the relevant industry wants to collab, in favor of supporting human artists.

I always find it funny that people are up in arms about artists supposedly losing their jobs, but have no problems with doctors losing their jobs to AI advancements.

Replace the people who actually contribute to society and no issues, but god forbid the pixel artist can't get paid to doodle anymore.

I think it's fair to feel bad for how AI is going to eat all of our lunches (either now or 5min from now).

But at the end of the day, you either accept it or pitch an alternative. What's the alternative? Freeze tech advancement at 2020's tech in your country? At what expense, and for what gain?

The guillotine will be the alternative if we don't figure out how society is going to function and distribute resources when there is minimal demand for human labor.
Sure. But it's not the responsibility of every individual who builds a lil AI tool to solve that.

And there may be no viable solution except for the one that we JIT at the last possible second like humanity always does for everything.

If you seriously think doctors are losing their jobs due to ai advances, you need to check your sources.

Most likely, more people will need medical attention.

Of course they're going to lose their job. ChatGPT is already replacing a bunch of requests that would otherwise be at a walk-in clinic. AI is being shown to be a better diagnostician in many cases than physicians. AI is rapidly reducing the need for radiologists.

You think in 20 years you have more doctors than today? Please.

My wife is a pediatric ER doctor. There has been no decrease in visits since ChatGPT came out. If anything there have been more because ChatGPT over recommends ER visits.

Expert systems have been able to diagnose many illnesses better than doctors for decades but they have replaced precisely zero doctors for many reasons, but the biggest is that they can’t accept liability for their recommendations.

No company will ever release a consumer medical product that doesn’t tell 99% of patients they should check with their doctor.

Also do you have any idea how many times my wife has said something to friends and family like “no you don’t need to go to the ER, you can wait and if their fever doesn’t go away in X days see their pediatrician during normal hours. It’s likely a virus and nothing can be done anyway”, only to have that person take their child to the ER because they want a doctor to look at their kid and tell them face face that nothing is wrong.

A phone call with an expert they know isn’t enough to replace an in person visit. ChatGPT will never be enough.

As far as radiologists go, they haven’t been replaced yet despite people saying it would happen for years. And they are in a unique position where people never actually see them.

But even if all image reads are done with AI, they can always retrain as interventional radiologists.

ChatGPT came out 2 years ago. The fact you think you're going to see rapid changes this quickly is ridiculous.

Your wife's anecdotal info is a meaningless datapoint.

> ChatGPT is already replacing a bunch of requests that would otherwise be at a walk-in clinic.

That was just to counter this statement.

It’s also not her anecdote, it’s based on data across her entire enormous group. None of the ERs they staff have seen drops.

> AI is rapidly reducing the need for radiologists.

I work in radiology. This isn’t true. Having the AI circle the obviously broken bone, and put a ‘maybe fracture’ on anything vaguely difficult to interpret is a waste of time.

I also receive ‘AI’ referrals. They are hot trash and generate more work that the worst human referral. They sound like they are saying something sensible. But they aren’t.

For health I want the best possible solution. If that ends up being AI, then screw humans.
If your work is of so low quality that an algorithm that only generates "shitty art" (by popular consensus) puts you out of work, then you don't deserve to get paid for your "art." It's Schrödinger's art: it's really bad and good at the same time, good enough to put artists out of work.

People don't get paid for work that machines can do. It's not a novel concept.

I'm not sure where you consensus is coming from but AI art is getting really, really good. I used to be able to easily tell what was AI art when others couldn't but that's changing fast.

It's been trained on some of the best artwork. Various artists have been told their artwork looks like AI, meanwhile it's actually the other around. Already in the app stores there are many games full of AI art that the average person without an artist's eye probably can't see the difference compared to something a human made.

I think art is very different from other jobs, it's more like the soul of humanity. When we look back through time, we mainly look at the art and what it can tell us, only a niche portion of people will care about the other things.

If we let machines do everything, even create our culture and art, what is left for us? Just to be consumers?

A lot of people are saying that a) AI generates slop that no one needs, and b) AI is putting human artists out of work.

If the machine can do art that's indistinguishable from human art, and art is the soul of humanity, then the machine may have a soul? I've told the machine to create art, I've showed the art to humans, and the humans were touched by it. It evoked an emotion, like art is supposed to.

My personal anecdote: I've used a diffusion model to generate a short video based on a 50 year old photograph, the only photo my dear friend has of his late father that he never got to know. The 10-second video showed the man lifelike, happy and smiling, generated from a photo on which he looked morose. My friend was brought to tears when I showed it to him.

> My personal anecdote: I've used a diffusion model to generate a short video based on a 50 year old photograph, the only photo my dear friend has of his late father that he never got to know. The 10-second video showed the man lifelike, happy and smiling, generated from a photo on which he looked morose. My friend was brought to tears when I showed it to him.

That's beautiful.

These tools will help people find more meaning in our short lives.

>the man The man, right. Not the father.
> If your work is of so low quality that an algorithm that only generates "shitty art" (by popular consensus) puts you out of work, then you don't deserve to get paid for your "art."

> People don't get paid for work that machines can do. It's not a novel concept.

Thank you! I'm sick of sounding like an apologist. This is simply the science of economics.

>> No shame in proudly presenting a tool with "putting people out of work" as a feature.

I am so tired of this type of attitude. I've read this endlessly and it does a whole lot of nothing for nobody.

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

Someone might not pursue game dev because they can't build the art for it themselves. Now they have options.

>> Lovingly handcrafted artwork is what I like in video games [...]

Then you go buy that thing and stop dunking on people for making tools.

Give those artists you care about your money. Let the rest of us enjoy the new tools and the work created with them.

You don't weep for all the i18n experts when someone makes a nice open source datetime library. So stop doing it here.

Software engineers constantly have to learn new things and adapt. The artists will do the same.

If they actually start using the tools, maybe they can start making games and movies and things of a scale and scope they could never have done before.

The things you can accomplish with video models are downright impressive:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAiiKteM-U

Someone told me, "But you didn't hire any hard-working stop motion animators."

Yes, that's right. Because it never would have been made before. Because stop motion animating a 4-minute Superman fandom short didn't make economic sense.

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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.

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...

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cool. great to know. will msg you, we can chat more.
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> 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.

This is awesome, good luck with this tool. Can it do isometric and top down views?
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.
Adobe has been working on some real cool stuff like this. IMO, AI should be a tool to support the creative process, and not to replace it.
I would like to know what sort of AI is trained to do this.
I operated for 30 minutes, but it didn't achieve the result I wanted
sorry, there were way too more requests than the compute power i prepared for. New GPUs are added. you can give it a try
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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

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.

sorry for the inconvenience.

I've fixed it.

ALso given your account 2x more credits.

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.
Calm down it’s a 1 person company. The entitlement is over the top
Got the credits! Thanks!

I am researching the landscape for building a coding agent to generate social games, your tool is a nice coincidence.

Good luck with the product!

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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.