How to make game assets with AI in one style

Game assets are the art, sprites, models, sound and music that ship with a game. A coding agent can make them in three ways. It can write code that draws them, write scripts that build them in a tool like Blender, or call an image generator.

Which of those your tool can do differs a little. According to Anthropic, all current Claude models produce text output (model overview), so Claude Code draws in code or calls an image service you connect through an MCP server.

Cursor’s Agent even has image generation built in (Cursor docs), and OpenAI’s browser-game guide gives Codex an ImageGen skill for concept art, sprites, backgrounds and UI assets (Codex use case).

Everything about the tools is as of September 2026, and each claim links to the page it came from.

Which route fits your game?

Drawing in code works for pixel-style, abstract and simple 3D looks, while generated images make sense when you want characters or scenery with a drawn or painted look. Some games mix the two in a clever way, like Shatter Drift, which pairs custom shaders and procedural audio with AI-generated skyboxes.

Route	What it is	Examples in our catalog
Code-drawn	The agent writes canvas, shader or geometry code, and sound is synthesized in code	Hollow Crown, Metal Assault, Out Of The Box
Generated images	An image model makes sprites, backgrounds or textures that you keep as files	Exploding Hamsters, Vibe Party
Scripted 3D	Scripts build the 3D models, for example in Blender, and the game loads the exported files	Pro Skater: The Warehouse, Call of Naija

Sound splits pretty much the same way. Web Audio sources can be computed mathematically, like an oscillator (MDN), and HALDANE-4 pairs procedural sound with a single AI-generated voice-over.

AI sound effects and music for games covers audio in depth, and image to 3D for games covers models generated from a picture.

Code can draw the sprites and make the sound

Some games draw everything in code, and some use generated images. What we say about how each one was made comes from its entry, which draws on the creator’s own words or the game’s repository.

The engine alone won’t tell you where the art came from, but Hollow Crown and Metal Assault actually describe the asset-making process in their repositories. Several entries say their art and sound come from code.

• Hollow Crown by rehan-remade pulls a neat trick and makes every sprite, effect and sound with code, so not a single image or audio file gets loaded. Its repository marks it as made with Claude Code.

• In Metal Assault by AndreaZero, the pixel-art sprites, levels, sound effects and music are all procedural. According to its repository, Claude Fable built the whole game, assets included, which is a lot of game for one model.

• Out Of The Box by tanuu5 gets its visuals from shaders and generated geometry, and its sound is synthesized with Web Audio.

• Pengu Smash by s1mphon1 produces its visuals, water effects and chiptune music all in code.

• HALDANE-4 by denisbondare has ASCII graphics in a download under 5 MB, and it was made with Cursor.

Other games use generated images. The creator of Exploding Hamsters says the art comes from AI image generation, which they felt had become good enough to produce consistent, interesting characters.

Vibe Party leans on AI-generated characters, backgrounds and game assets, because its creator wanted to see how far that could go in a full party game. BeatPaws has AI-generated cats, which seems like a nice use for an image model, and the skyboxes in Shatter Drift are AI-generated too.

How do you get a consistent sprite set from an image model?

Fix the style before you generate, then reuse one reference for every image, because models drift. OpenAI’s guide even says its model “may occasionally struggle to maintain visual consistency for recurring characters or brand elements across multiple generations” (OpenAI).

If your character needs to move, AI sprite animation for games covers pose plans for walks, idles and attacks, sheet slicing, and playback code for Phaser, PixiJS and Canvas.

1. Write the style down. Put the palette, outline, sprite size and camera angle in one short file that you and the agent both read.

2. Save every prompt. OpenAI’s Codex guide for browser games says to save the prompts you used in a .prompts folder, so you can generate more of the same assets later (Codex use case).

3. Reuse reference images. In Google’s Gemini API, Nano Banana 2 (Gemini 3.1 Flash Image) takes up to four character images and up to three style references, and Nano Banana Pro takes up to five character images (Google).

4. Ask for a clean background. OpenAI documents transparent output, which you get by setting background: "transparent" with png or webp (OpenAI). Google’s guide doesn’t mention transparent output, so with that tool, ask for a flat single-color background and cut it out.

5. Keep frames the same size. In Phaser, a spritesheet has uniform cells in rows or columns, while an atlas has frames in any size and position (Phaser docs). In Three.js, a Sprite is a plane that always faces the camera, generally with a partially transparent texture (Three.js docs), which suits the transparent images from step 4 nicely.

6. Set pixel-art rendering. Phaser’s pixelArt option sets antialias to false and roundPixels to true, which its docs call the best setting for pixel-art games (Phaser). In plain canvas, set imageSmoothingEnabled to false (MDN), or use image-rendering: pixelated in CSS (MDN).

7. Check the result in the game. Ask the agent to run the game and take a screenshot, which Anthropic’s guide lists as a check the agent can run (Claude Code docs).

Keep the art from slowing the game

Set a download budget before you generate anything. The Vibe Jam 2026 rules banned loading screens and heavy downloads, and a game had to start almost instantly (jam rules). That’s a pretty good target outside a jam, too.

And it really can be done. According to their entries, HALDANE-4 ships as a download under 5 MB, and Shatter Drift loads at under a megabyte.

Formats help too. Phaser can use any image format the browser can display (Phaser docs), and Three.js’s GLTFLoader reads glTF 2.0 and lists support for WebP and AVIF textures and for Draco, Meshopt and KTX2 compression (Three.js docs). OpenAI’s image API returns PNG, JPEG or WebP.

What do Steam and itch.io ask you to disclose about AI art?

They both ask, and they both name art. Steam’s Content Survey lists artwork, sound, narrative and localization among the AI-generated content to disclose, and it says efficiency gains from AI tools aren’t its focus (Steam).

itch.io’s generative AI disclosure field asks whether a project contains generative AI, and if it does, which kinds, out of graphics, sound, text and dialog, or code. That’s a big deal, since untagged generative AI assets are no longer eligible for its browse pages, according to its November 20, 2024 announcement (itch.io).

Copyright is a separate question. On January 29, 2025, the U.S. Copyright Office said AI output can be protected only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements, and that excludes the mere provision of prompts (Copyright Office).

That report covers US law, and none of this is legal advice. Selling AI-made games covers store rules and tool terms in more detail.

Ask for code-drawn art, a sprite sheet or a size check

Swap in your own details where the brackets are. For code-drawn art, try this.

Draw every sprite in code on a [16 by 16] grid with this palette: [list of hex colors]. Write one function per character that draws it to the canvas, so I can change the palette in one place. Load no image files. Run the game and send me a screenshot.

For a sprite sheet from an image model, something like this works.

A [4]-frame walk cycle for [a small robot], side view, pixel art, [32 by 32] pixels per frame, [8]-color palette, flat single-color background, the same character in every frame.

And this is an asset budget check for your agent.

List every file the game loads with its size in KB, then the total. Flag anything over [200] KB and tell me how to shrink it. The first load must stay under [5] MB.

Add 3D models and sound next

For the 3D and audio side, see image to 3D for games and AI sound effects and music. Our 10 prompts to copy have more templates, and how to make a mobile game with AI covers screen sizes and touch controls.

Vibe coding game jam shows why small downloads matter in a jam. How to make a game with AI and selling AI-made games cover the basics and the rules. How to make a 3D game with AI and the best engine for vibe coding cover the engine side.

Or browse the Three.js, Phaser and PixiJS hubs.