Retrogaze

Type what you need: character, enemy, item, tile, UI element, sprite sheet, walking set, UI frame. Pick a console and an era. Retrogaze generates it inside that platform's actual palette, tile limits, and sprite rules. NES gets 54 colors with four per tile. Game Boy gets four shades. Genesis gets 512. Output runs on real hardware and faithful emulators, not just "looks retro" on a modern monitor.

Six animation cycles: walk, attack, death, cast, idle, jump. Four-frame spritesheets with zero palette drift between frames. Batch generation produces up to four candidates at once so you pick the one that fits. Upload a reference sketch or mockup and Retrogaze works from it. Palette lock keeps colors consistent across a full project.

Export as PNG, sprite sheets, atlas JSON, or palette files (GPL, hex, PAL). Scaled from 1x to 8x. Drop output into Unity, Godot, GameMaker, or a homebrew toolkit.

Consoles

NES, SNES, Genesis, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Commodore 64, PC-Engine. Each target enforces its own palette size, tile budget, and sprite dimensions. An era selector (Retro 1978-83, Early 1983-84, Mid 1985-86, Late 1987+) sets the constraint strictness within each console.

Aseprite integration

Retrogaze ships an MCP server that integrates directly with Aseprite. Output is a real .aseprite file with editable layers and palette. No exporting, no re-importing. If Aseprite is your pixel art pipeline, Retrogaze plugs into it natively.

Ethics

Retrogaze did not train a model on pixel art. No itch.io scraping, no DeviantArt harvesting. The constraint layer is the product, built on top of general-purpose image generation that already exists as public infrastructure.

The ethics page credits 34 artists by name across six consoles: the people who built the visual language Retrogaze draws from, from Kazuko Shibuya's Final Fantasy sprites to Steve Mayles's pre-rendered DKC Kremlings. Five to ten percent of net profit goes back to the pixel art community once profitable. Artist recommendations surface in-app after every generation. All Retrogaze branding and marketing art is commissioned from working pixel artists. No AI art in the marketing.

The honest scope: Retrogaze is a prototyping tool for developers who can't draw. Solo devs, hobbyists, game jam participants who need a placeholder sprite to keep building. If your game reaches the point where you're shipping it to real players, hire a real artist. The constraint tools work on hand-drawn art too, so when you bring an artist on, Retrogaze stays useful to both of you.

Upcoming

Pre-rendered sprite mode for the SNES, targeting the Donkey Kong Country / Super Mario RPG aesthetic: 3D models compressed into console-legal sprites, the way Rare and Square did it on SGI workstations in the mid-90s.

Pricing

Free tier: 5 generations per day, all 9 asset types, all features included. Paid tiers from $5 to $20/month add generation history, saved settings, API access, and higher volume. Full breakdown at retrogazeai.com.

Try it

Closed beta. Live at retrogazeai.com.