Notes from the forge
How real pixel art generation works: grids, palettes, tilesets that tile - and what image generators get structurally wrong.
AUGUST 2026 · 7 MIN READ
Why AI pixel art looks bad (and what actually fixes it)
Mixels, colour bloat and mushy edges - the three tells your eye reads as "off", the single technical cause behind all of them, and the honest list of fixes, including the two that aren't our product. With a colour-count receipt your browser computes live.
AUGUST 2026 · 6 MIN READ
Why AI tilesets don't tile (and what a Wang set is)
You generated a tileset, painted a map, and got seams or a repeating stamp. What seamless actually requires, why downscaled diffusion output structurally can't deliver it, and how deriving edges by construction fixes it - with the magnified proof.
More is coming. Meanwhile, the tileset generator page has the live map painter, and the landing page has the whole story.