Every sprite we generate is reduced to a limited palette. That’s what makes it look like pixel art rather than a shrunken painting, and it keeps animations from flickering.
Default palette sizes
Each style preset sets a sensible maximum:
| Style | Colours by default |
|---|---|
| 1-bit | 2 (black and white, fixed) |
| 8-bit | 4 per sprite, like NES hardware |
| Game Boy | 4 fixed shades of green |
| PICO-8 | the fixed 16-colour PICO-8 palette |
| GBA, Chibi | 24 |
| 16-bit, SNES, Isometric | 32 |
| HD pixel | 48 |
1-bit, Game Boy and PICO-8 always use their fixed palettes, so the Max colors setting doesn’t apply to them.
Transparent pixels don’t count toward the limit.
Setting your own limit
Use Max colors in the generator (or palette in the API) to set a different number from 2 to 256. Some guidelines:
- 4–8 colours: strong retro look, very readable at 16–32 px. Good for jam games and Game Boy-style projects.
- 12–16 colours: the classic range for characters at 32–64 px. Enough for a light, mid and dark tone of each main colour plus an outline.
- 24–32 colours: detailed 64–128 px characters and bosses.
- More than 48: rarely useful for sprites. It also makes later palette swaps harder.
Fewer colours almost always reads better in motion. If an animation looks noisy, try lowering the limit before anything else.
Keeping a cast consistent
Characters drawn separately can end up with slightly different skin tones, outline colours or shading. To keep a game cohesive:
- Use the same style and max colours for every character in a scene.
- Generate one hero you like, then use it as the reference image for the others, with a prompt like “same art style, different character: …”.
- After generating, map every sprite onto one shared palette with the free Palette Transfer tool.
Changing colours after generation
You don’t need to regenerate to recolour. These free tools run in your browser:
- Palette Swapper: recolour a sprite or a whole sheet with a retro palette or your own, keeping shading intact. Great for enemy variants (red slime, blue slime, gold slime) at no credit cost.
- Color Reducer: bring an image down to N colours.
- Palette Extractor: pull the exact palette out of a sprite to reuse elsewhere.
- Palette Generator: build a new ramp-based palette.
For an edit that needs the AI, such as “make the armour gold and the cape green”, use Edit (2 credits). It keeps the pose and style and changes only what you describe.
Picking a palette for your game
If you’re choosing a game-wide palette from scratch, our guide Pixel art palettes for games explains hue-shifted ramps and contrast, and includes free palettes (PICO-8, DawnBringer 16, Sweetie 16, Endesga 32 and more) with exact hex codes.
Related: Writing prompts that make good sprites · Fixing jitter and flicker