AI-powered pixel art sprite sheet generator. Upload or generate characters → animate → slice → preview → export game-ready sheets for Unity, Godot, GameMaker, RPG Maker.
Status: Pre-launch · Active development · Join the waitlist
🌐 spritebrew.com — Try it now (free account required for AI generation)
SpriteBrew is a web-based tool for game developers and pixel artists that combines traditional sprite sheet workflows with AI-powered generation. Create new characters from text descriptions, animate existing pixel art, preview animations with keyboard controls, and export to every major game engine — all in one place.
Free tools (no account needed): Upload & Slice, Animation Preview, Multi-Engine Export, Pixel Editor, Pixel-Perfect Resizer
AI features (free account, 5 generations/day): Text-to-Sprite Generation, Animate My Character
Describe a character in plain text and get a complete animated sprite sheet. Choose from multiple animation styles including 4-angle walking, walking & idle, small sprites, and VFX. Powered by Retro Diffusion's pixel art models.
Upload your existing pixel art character and generate animation frames from it. Walk cycles, idle loops, attacks, jumps, crouches, and destruction animations — the AI preserves your character's appearance while creating smooth motion. Smart animation padding ensures weapons and motion aren't clipped.
Drop any character image and SpriteBrew handles the rest: contour-based sprite detection, smart cropping, background removal with adjustable tolerance, and pixel-perfect resize to 64×64. Before/after preview with one-click approval. Edit the prepped image in the built-in pixel editor if auto-detection missed something.
Drop any sprite sheet PNG, configure frame dimensions (auto-detect or manual), and slice it into individual frames. Grid overlay preview, multi-select frames, contour-based detection for non-grid layouts, and smart auto-assignment of animation groups with directional detection.
PixiJS-powered interactive demo area with full keyboard controls. Walk your character around with arrow keys, trigger attacks with spacebar, and test animations in real-time. Supports 4-directional movement for top-down RPG sprites. Multiple tiled backgrounds (grid, grass, dungeon, stone).
Export to six formats in one click:
- TexturePacker JSON Hash (Unity, Godot, general)
- Aseprite JSON (pixel art workflow)
- GameMaker horizontal strips
- RPG Maker MV/MZ 3×4 grid
- Godot SpriteFrames .tres
- Raw Frames ZIP (individual PNGs)
Click any frame to open a zoomed pixel editor. Fix AI artifacts, touch up details, or make manual adjustments. Pencil, eraser, eyedropper, color palette, undo/redo (50 states, Ctrl+Z). Edit at 8-16× zoom with pixel grid overlay and 1× preview alongside.
Browse all past generations with filtering (Created vs Animated). Download PNGs, send to slicer, or delete. Per-user history — each account sees only their own generations.
Sign in with GitHub or email. Free tools work without an account. AI generation requires a free login (5 generations/day). Powered by Clerk with production SSO.
Built-in nearest-neighbor resizing for preparing pixel art for animation. Upload a high-res character, resize to 64×64 with crisp pixel-perfect scaling — no blurry bilinear interpolation.
| Layer | Technology |
|---|---|
| Framework | Next.js 16 (React 19) |
| Styling | Tailwind CSS v4 |
| State | Zustand |
| Animation | PixiJS 8 |
| Auth | Clerk (@clerk/react) |
| AI Backend | Retro Diffusion (direct API + Replicate hosting) |
| Storage | Cloudflare KV |
| Export | JSZip |
| Hosting | Cloudflare Pages |
| License | AGPL-3.0 |
- SSE streaming with 15-second heartbeats to work around Cloudflare Pages' 120-second proxy timeout during long AI generations
- Base64 image pipeline — no URL expiration issues, images cached per-user in generation gallery
- Per-user daily limits via localStorage with admin bypass for development
- Waitlist system backed by Cloudflare KV for Pro tier signups
- Contour-based sprite detection using connected component labeling for non-grid sprite sheets
- Calibration-driven development — when AI APIs are undocumented, we write targeted calibration scripts to get ground truth
# Clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/GAlbanese09/spritebrew.git
cd spritebrew
# Install dependencies
npm install
# Set up environment variables
cp .env.example .env.localAdd your API keys to .env.local:
REPLICATE_API_TOKEN=your_replicate_token
RETRO_DIFFUSION_API_KEY=your_retrodiffusion_key
NEXT_PUBLIC_CLERK_PUBLISHABLE_KEY=your_clerk_publishable_key
CLERK_SECRET_KEY=your_clerk_secret_key
# Run development server
npm run devOpen http://localhost:3000 to see the app.
Note: The waitlist feature requires a Cloudflare KV binding (SPRITEBREW_KV) to work in production. Local development works without it (falls back to in-memory storage).
SpriteBrew exists because a friend is building a pixel art game and needed sprite sheets. Making them by hand is brutally slow — every frame, every direction, every animation state, hand-drawn. There had to be a better way.
Built by George Albanese — an endpoint automation engineer by day, solo indie developer by night. Built with Claude, session by session, from empty repo to production tool.
- Phase 1: Web shell, sprite slicer, export engine (6 formats)
- Phase 2: AI integration (Retro Diffusion)
- Landing page and waitlist
- Clerk production auth
- Visual style picker with live previews
- Full Retro Diffusion direct API migration (unlocks 40+ styles)
- Credit system with Stripe integration
- OpenNext migration (replace deprecated
@cloudflare/next-on-pages) - Self-hosted AI pipeline (ComfyUI on RunPod)
- Isometric sprite support
- Tauri desktop app (Phase 4)
- Retro Diffusion — the AI models that make SpriteBrew's pixel art generation possible. Built by pixel artists, for pixel artists.
- Clerk — authentication without the pain
- Cloudflare — Pages, KV, and the infrastructure that keeps this running on a hobby budget
- PixiJS — the rendering engine behind the animation preview
- Claude (Anthropic) — architect, research partner, prompt writer, rubber duck
- George's friend — the reason this exists in the first place [https://github.com/mohammadsalim]
AGPL-3.0 — Open source with SaaS protection. You can use, modify, and distribute SpriteBrew, but if you deploy a modified version as a service, you must release your changes under the same license.
SpriteBrew is in early development and pre-launch. If you're interested in contributing, please open an issue first to discuss what you'd like to work on. A Contributor License Agreement (CLA) will be required before merging PRs.
Bug reports, feature suggestions, and feedback are welcome via GitHub Issues.
Built with ☕ and Claude · spritebrew.com