AI Sprite Maker: Ship Game-Ready Assets and Pocket $1K–$10K/Month

Most indie devs and small studios hit the same wall on 2D projects: hand-drawing characters eats weeks, outsourcing burns $500-$2,000 per sprite sheet, and raw AI image dumps arrive with broken alpha channels, no animation frames, and zero consistency. They look pretty for mood boards but are useless inside Unity, Godot, or Cocos.

The open-source desktop app covered in the source post fills that gap. Built on Tauri, Svelte, Rust, and SQLite, it talks to your locally installed Codex CLI and runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Type a description in the chat box or drop in a reference sketch, and it spits out a clean transparent-background sprite. Type “Animate this” and the tool first plans the full motion sequence, then generates 24-48 frames one by one. Each frame carries the character identity reference plus context from the previous frame, so the silhouette and palette stay locked. Output