Raster, sprite, tile, background, and UI pipeline
Use this reference for production 2D art and raster textures. Generated output is source material; dimensions, grids, alpha, anchors, and import settings remain deterministic engineering concerns.
Sprites and animation
- Approve one idle/neutral seed at the final view and approximate game scale.
- Lock canvas size, baseline/ground point, facing, palette, outline, proportions, and costume.
- For a short animation, request the whole action as one strip or sheet referenced to the seed. Independent frame requests drift more. Treat the returned grid as a candidate, not exact data.
- Slice and normalize frames with one shared scale and one shared anchor—usually bottom-center.
- If frame 1 must equal a shipped idle pose, restore the exact seed after slicing.
- Preview as a contact sheet and in motion. Check volume, foot sliding, silhouette, and cadence.
For true pixel art, enforce a real pixel grid after generation. Remove blended pseudo-pixels, single-pixel noise, excess colors, banding, and inconsistent clusters. Resize only with nearest-neighbor unless a deliberate preprocessing pass says otherwise.
Tiles and repeatable textures
- Define tile dimensions and neighbor rules before creating art.
- Produce a base, transitions, corners, isolated pieces, and decoration as one visual family.
- Keep gameplay edges and collision meaning legible; decorative shadows must not imply false walls.
- Test seamless materials in a 3×3 repeat at full size and at minified camera scale.
- Inspect terrain combinations in the engine's autotile/terrain system, not only in a sheet.
- Keep padding/extrusion compatible with the engine/atlas tool to prevent texture bleeding.
Backgrounds and parallax
- Split sky, far, mid, near, and foreground layers according to intended parallax speed.
- Avoid unique landmarks near horizontal seams when layers must scroll/repeat.
- Preserve a low-contrast playfield behind characters and projectiles.
- Keep focal detail away from HUD safe areas and critical navigation silhouettes.
- Export layers independently with overlap so camera movement cannot expose gaps.
UI art and icons
- Keep labels, numbers, dynamic copy, focus state, and accessibility text code-native.
- Generate or draw ornament, frames, portraits, and texture—not rasterized functional text.
- Prefer one established icon family. Simple geometric symbols should usually be SVG/vector.
- Provide normal, hover/focus, pressed, disabled, selected, and warning states when art changes.
- Design scalable panels as 9-slice/nine-patch assets; verify corners and borders at several sizes.
Import checkpoints
Godot 4.7: choose nearest filtering for crisp pixel art; use mipmaps when non-pixel textures
shrink substantially; set repeat only for textures designed to tile; verify Sprite2D,
TileSet, atlas regions, and animation frames in the editor.
Unity 6.3 LTS: set Texture Type to Sprite (2D and UI), choose Single/Multiple correctly, set a consistent Pixels Per Unit, filter mode, compression, mipmaps, mesh type, and sprite slicing. Disable Read/Write unless runtime pixel access is actually required because it adds memory cost.
Phaser/PixiJS/web: keep atlas metadata and image filenames stable; use nearest sampling and integer camera scaling for pixel art; prevent browser/CSS resizing from introducing blur; inspect texture bleeding under the real renderer.