AI Game Maker 2D: Keep Your Art From Drifting

2D is the easiest place to start with an AI game maker, because the rules fit on a flat screen and small mistakes are easy to see. The hard part is art that drifts, so fix your picture size and style on day one.

What does drifting look like?

You ask an AI for a hero on Monday and a shopkeeper on Tuesday. Each looks fine alone. Side by side, the outlines differ in thickness, the light comes from different sides, and the shopkeeper is twice as detailed. Your game now looks like a collage.

This happens because each picture is a fresh guess. The cure is to take the guessing away.

Decide three things first

The tile size. Most 2D games sit on an invisible grid. 16, 32 and 64 pixels per square are common choices. Smaller tiles are easier to keep consistent and look more retro. Larger ones show more detail, and each picture takes more work to get right. Changing this later means redoing every picture, so pick now.

The style card. Write it once, then paste it into every art request. Here is one for Mushroom Market, an invented game about a young fox trading with talking mushrooms in a forest:

Style card: Mushroom Market
- Seen from above, tiles of 32 by 32 pixels
- Hero fits in 32 by 48 pixels
- Outline: 1 pixel, dark brown, never black
- 12 colours only
- Light comes from the top left
- No text inside pictures

The engine. For a browser game, Phaser is a free 2D framework that AI tools can work with. For a game you download, Godot is a common choice, and our Godot page explains how to get AI help inside it.

Coloured squares first

Build the whole game with labelled squares: a green one reading "hero", a red one reading "shop". It sounds silly, and it saves you a lot. You find out what the game needs before you pay for any of it. Mushroom Market might turn out to need three mushrooms and not twelve.

There is a neat side effect. If your AI first draws every situation in the game, it can work out the art list from that drawing. That gives you a list with a reason behind each row, not a wish list. The drawing uses Mermaid, which is text that becomes a picture at mermaid.live.

If you plan to publish on Steam

Keep that list up to date for one more reason. Steam's form, as reported in January 2026, asks developers to disclose AI use in content that ships with the game and that players see or hear, including art and sound. A statement then appears on the store page. AI tools used only to work faster fall outside that part of the form. Rules differ between stores and they change, so read the current form when you get there.

If you want to see how a rule looks once it is written down, browse the mechanics pages.

Paste this to your AI

My 2D game is Mushroom Market, seen from above, with 32 by 32 pixel tiles. Do not add any real art yet. Draw everything as coloured squares with a short label.

Start with a Mermaid diagram of every situation in the game and what is on screen in each: walking, talking to a mushroom, trading, game over. Check that each situation has a way back.

Then create art-list.md from that diagram, with one row per picture: its name, size in pixels, number of animation frames, and the situations it appears in. Name the file and line that draws each thing. List nothing you cannot point to. Ideas for later go under a heading called "maybe".

Whenever something new appears on screen, add it to the diagram and the list in the same step, and show me the new row.

Or skip this and connect the MCP: your AI then finds all of this by itself.Connect the MCP

How to check it worked

• Count what you see. Walk through the game and tick off each square on the list. Anything left over is a mistake on one side.
• Resize the window. Tiles should stay aligned, with no thin gaps between them.
• Put two pictures side by side. Take one from day one and one from today. Do they belong together?
• Swap one square for a drawing. It should line up exactly where the square was.