AI Game Art Pipeline Skill

Provider-neutral workflows for turning AI images and videos into playable game assets.

This skill helps agents plan, generate, clean, package, and QA game-runtime art assets: sprites, icons, backgrounds, video-to-frames animation, cinematic ultimates, anchors, compression, and runtime checks.

Created by Y Build, an AI agent platform for building, launching, and growing apps.

It is not a prompt pack or a model leaderboard. The point is to ship assets that survive a real game loop.

Why This Exists

Most AI game art demos stop at a beautiful image. Games need stricter things:

Transparent sprites that do not jitter.
Animation frames with stable identity and readable silhouettes.
Backgrounds that fit mobile GPU texture limits.
Cinematic effects that look rich without owning gameplay logic.
Audio, hit timing, anchors, and compression that hold up in runtime.

The core rule:

Pick the pipeline by runtime job, not by model hype.

Install

Recommended, if you use the Agent Skills installer:

npx skills add ybuild-ai/ai-game-art-pipeline-skill --skill ai-game-art-pipeline -g

Manual Codex install:

git clone https://github.com/ybuild-ai/ai-game-art-pipeline-skill.git ~/.codex/skills/ai-game-art-pipeline

Manual Claude Code install:

git clone https://github.com/ybuild-ai/ai-game-art-pipeline-skill.git ~/.claude/skills/ai-game-art-pipeline

Then ask your agent for tasks like:

"Use the AI game art pipeline skill to plan a 2D action RPG sprite pipeline."
"Generate prompts and post-processing steps for a combat sprite sheet."
"Turn a cinematic ultimate video into runtime frames and code-owned hit logic."
"Audit these game assets for mobile runtime shipping risks."

What You Get

Runtime job	Recommended route
Static props, items, FX icons	Image model + style refs + removable background
Existing or brand character	Reuse canonical sprite sheets before regenerating
Combat character animation	Keyframe-first + 2D grid + post-processing + curation
Walk/run/body mechanics	Prefer video motion reference; use 3D skeleton only when cleanup is acceptable
Ambient loops	Video model -> extracted frames
Cinematic ultimate / boss intro	Full-screen video-to-frames + code-driven hit logic
Runtime feel	Deterministic code: hit pause, shake, particles, trails, SFX

Visual Examples

Combat sprites	Cinematic ultimate

Motion reference tradeoff	Pipeline map

Repository Layout

SKILL.md
references/
  static-assets.md
  battle-sprites.md
  motion-video.md
  backgrounds.md
  runtime-shipping.md
scripts/
  provider_stub.py
  chroma_key_magenta.py
  sheet_contact.py
  extract_video_frames.py
examples/
  prompts.md
  batch_generation_example.py
  providers/
    README.md
    minimal_provider_example.py
    http_image_provider_example.py
    http_video_provider_example.py
media/
  pipeline-map.jpg
  battle-sprite-grid.jpg
  seedance-awakening-frames.jpg
  skeleton-vs-video-motion.jpg

Bundled Scripts

Scripts are local utilities only. They do not contain API keys, endpoints, private paths, or vendor SDK code.

Script	Purpose
`scripts/provider_stub.py`	Adapter interface users can implement for their own image/video provider
`scripts/chroma_key_magenta.py`	Remove solid magenta backgrounds from generated assets
`scripts/sheet_contact.py`	Build numbered contact sheets for sprite curation
`scripts/extract_video_frames.py`	Extract and resize video frames for runtime texture sequences

Examples:

python scripts/chroma_key_magenta.py input.png output.png
python scripts/sheet_contact.py frames/ contact.png --cols 6
python scripts/extract_video_frames.py ultimate.mp4 frames/ --fps 14 --start 0.6 --duration 3.6 --width 1280

Provider Adapters, Not SDKs

The skill intentionally does not ship a real image/video SDK. Model APIs change quickly, and users should own credentials, endpoints, model names, retry policy, and billing behavior.

Instead, the repo includes thin adapter examples:

Example	Use it when
`examples/providers/minimal_provider_example.py`	You want a fake provider to test the pipeline shape locally
`examples/providers/http_image_provider_example.py`	You have an image-generation HTTP proxy that returns a URL or base64 image
`examples/providers/http_video_provider_example.py`	You have an async video-generation HTTP proxy with job polling
`examples/batch_generation_example.py`	You want to turn a small art plan into provider requests

Read examples/providers/README.md before wiring a real provider.

Quick Workflow

Identify the runtime job and target engine.
Check whether canonical assets already exist.
Pick the smallest useful vertical slice.
Generate or reuse source visuals.
Post-process with deterministic scripts.
Preview at target size and target device.
Iterate surgically: rerun one animation, reprocess raw output, or repack frames.

Good Fit / Bad Fit

Good fit:

2D action RPGs, tactics games, card battlers, mobile games, UI-heavy games.
Teams using image/video generation but needing runtime-ready assets.
Agents that can run local scripts and edit asset pipelines.

Bad fit:

One-off marketing art.
Pure concept-art exploration with no runtime target.
Fully automated "make my whole game art set" workflows with no curation.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. The most useful additions are:

New provider adapters that keep credentials outside the repo.
Runtime preview templates for PixiJS, Canvas, Godot, Unity, SpriteKit, or web games.
More post-processing utilities for trimming, anchors, packing, and QA.
Real pipeline notes from shipped projects.

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.