How to Make Pixel Art Sprites for Games

The short answer

To make pixel art sprites for games, decide on one sprite size (for example 32×32) and one game resolution first, draw or generate on that exact grid with a small limited palette and a consistent outline, then scale up only by whole numbers using nearest-neighbour filtering. Those four decisions — grid, palette, outline, scaling — matter more than drawing talent for making sprites look like they belong in the same game.

1. Choose your resolution before anything else

Pixel art is defined by its grid. Pick a base sprite size that fits your game's camera: 16×16 suits retro and tile-based games, 32×32 is the most common middle ground, and 48×48 or 64×64 gives room for facial expressions and detailed weapons.

Then pick a low internal game resolution that scales cleanly to common screens. 320×180 and 640×360 both scale by whole numbers to 1920×1080 (6× and 3×). Rendering at a low resolution and scaling the whole frame up keeps every pixel the same size on screen, which is the single biggest visual tell of professional pixel art.

• 16×16: very readable, tiny palettes, fast to produce.
• 32×32: room for a face and a weapon; the most common choice.
• 64×64 and up: detailed characters, bosses and portraits.
• Keep tiles, characters and items at the same pixel density — never mix a 16px sword with a 64px hero at the same scale.

2. Limit the palette

A small shared palette is what makes a set of sprites feel unified. Many games use 16 to 32 colours for everything. Public palettes such as PICO-8 (16 colours), DawnBringer 32 and Endesga 32 are good starting points and are free to use.

Within the palette, build ramps of 3 to 5 shades per material and shift the hue as you go darker (towards blue or purple) and lighter (towards yellow). Hue-shifted ramps look richer than simply darkening the same colour. Choose one light direction — top-left is conventional — and shade every sprite from it.

3. Use a consistent outline

Outlines separate a sprite from busy backgrounds. A 1-pixel dark outline is the safest default for small sprites. Selective outlining (selout), where the outline takes a darker shade of the adjacent colour instead of pure black, looks softer and suits larger sprites. Whichever you choose, use it on every character and item; mixing outlined and unoutlined sprites is very noticeable.

Watch for 'jaggies' (uneven stair-steps on curves) and orphan pixels that do not connect to anything. Lines look smoothest when the step lengths change gradually, such as 3-2-1 rather than 3-1-3.

4. Scale with nearest-neighbour, by whole numbers

Never resize pixel art with bilinear or bicubic filtering — it blurs the edges. Use nearest-neighbour scaling and whole-number factors (2×, 3×, 4×). A 32px sprite shown at 3× becomes 96px with every pixel a crisp 3×3 block; shown at 2.5× some pixels become 2 wide and some 3, which makes sprites shimmer as they move.

In engines this means Filter Mode 'Point (no filter)' and Compression 'None' in Unity, or Default Texture Filter 'Nearest' in Godot 4, plus a camera setup that snaps to whole pixels (Unity's Pixel Perfect Camera, Godot's integer stretch scaling).

5. Avoid mixels and fake pixel art

Mixels are pixels of different sizes in the same scene — usually caused by scaling one sprite by a different factor, rotating pixel art freely, or using AI images that only look pixelated. Many AI image models produce 'pixel art style' pictures whose pixels are not aligned to any grid; zoom in and you see blurred blocks of uneven size and hundreds of near-identical colours.

SpriteLab handles this in post-processing: Pixel 16-bit, Pixel HD and Isometric Pixel results are snapped to a real pixel grid with a limited palette and a consistent outline, on a transparent background. If you need a bigger file for a store page or a print, its free pixel-perfect upscale goes up to 4096px without blurring.

A practical workflow

Whether you draw by hand, generate with AI, or mix both, this order keeps things consistent:

1. 01Fix the game resolution, sprite size and palette in a short style sheet before making any assets.
2. 02Make one hero sprite and treat it as the reference for outline, shading direction and detail level.
3. 03Produce the rest of the assets at the same size and against the same palette; reject anything that breaks the rules rather than trying to fix it later.
4. 04Clean up by hand in an editor such as Aseprite or LibreSprite: remove stray pixels, fix eyes and hands, check the silhouette in pure black.
5. 05Import with point/nearest filtering, no compression, and whole-number scaling, then review the sprites in-game against real backgrounds.