How Spritory works

The art style decides how pixels are formed: the shading model, the output resolution, the outline weight, and the projection.

Classic pixel is banded cel shading with 1px outlines and material texture, the Stardew Valley and Terraria look. Chunky retro swaps that for thick black outlines and two hard tones, closer to Shovel Knight. Painted pixel renders at double resolution with soft gradients and no outlines, like Hyper Light Drifter. Clean isometric extrudes boxes into 2:1 prisms for top-down builders. Flat vector is there too, for anti-aliased flat fills when you want a non-pixel look.

Art style and palette are independent, so every style profile applies on top of every art style. Switching either one recompiles what you already built.

A style profile is built from material ramps — five-shade gradients for each material type: foliage, wood, stone, metal, cloth, skin, creature, accent.

Each ramp runs from highlight to shadow. Spritory applies the right ramp to the right shape automatically based on material tags. Three stock profiles ship with the app — Meadow, Dusk and Pocket — so you can build something before you've authored anything.

Set your light direction, outline treatment, and whether you want dithering and procedural texture. These become part of the profile, and every asset that compiles through it inherits them.

Drop in a screenshot, a sprite from your game, or a tileset from an asset pack. Spritory reads its palette, groups the colors into material families with proper ramps, works out the outline ink, and detects dither — then hands back a profile you can edit and build against. Style extraction is part of the license.

Stock templates cover props, scenery and items — bush, tree, rock, crate, sword, potion, mushroom. Most people start from one and drag its shapes around rather than starting empty. The template picker shows each one compiled through the art style you picked, so you are choosing a shape, not a look. Characters and humanoids aren't in the box yet.

Build with primitives — blobs, capsules, boxes — and tag each one: this is metal, this is cloth, this is foliage. The style profile knows which ramp to apply to each material. You don't pick colors or shade anything by hand; the compiler does.

Resize shapes, reposition parts, change proportions. The style profile follows the structure, not the other way around. You're always editing the structure side; the style side stays consistent. Swap the profile and the whole asset recompiles.

Every asset carries a seed that drives its procedural texture. Reroll it for siblings that share the silhouette and palette but not the grain — so a forest is eight different trees rather than the same tree eight times.

Explosions, fire, smoke plumes, hit sparks, slashes, magic sparkles, dust puffs, muzzle flashes, heal auras, poison bubbles, electric zaps, water splashes. Each is a particle system you can tune — emitters, burst and rate, gravity, drag, lifetime.

Every particle is tagged with a material and compiles through the same style profile as your sprites. Effects land palette-exact against your game's art without anyone matching colors by hand. Art styles are a Sprite Forge dial for now; effects compile in the classic pixel style.

Because every frame compiles through the same rules rather than being sampled independently, animations don't shimmer or wander between frames — the failure mode that makes generated effects unusable.

Export a single asset as PNG at native size or 8× scale, or pack a whole set into a spritesheet with a JSON atlas of per-frame rects. Seed siblings export as a strip plus atlas in one go.

Effects export as sheets with the frame data alongside, ready to drive an animated sprite in your engine.

There's no engine plugin, and there doesn't need to be — PNG and JSON import directly. The license makes everything you export royalty-free for commercial use, with no attribution required.

The Forge is a deterministic renderer, not a generator. The same source and the same profile always produce exactly the same output. There are no credits, no quota, no queue, and no rerolling until something happens to look right.

The renderer is client-side. Nothing you build is sent anywhere to be drawn, and no model ever sees your work. If you save to the cloud, documents live in your account (encrypted at rest) and you can delete them — or the whole account — at any time.