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Oh man, you don't want to ask me that. I'm notorious for being a consummate idea guy. I used to write ttrpg books, and didn't finish them just because I'd have too many ideas for too many settings. My friends will tell you I always have three-dozen ideas going at any one time. :)

Thanks, that really made my day. It's been rough lately and that helped lift my spirits.

Oh man, I'm sorry to hear that. That's rough. That's always quite a pain when you put a lot of effort into something and it just gets lost like that.

And eyy, Unspeakable! I had to look this one up because it's been ages since I made these. That was a fun one, I'd just discovered a very creepy virtual instrument (think it was called "Baba Yaga") and that track was actually just me playing around with it. Fun times. No joke I messed around with that virtual instrument for hours when I first found it. My room must have sounded like the gates of Hell for a while. :)

Thanks, many people underestimate the power of older Photoshop versions. Sure, they don't have all the bells and whistles of the new ones, but I can still do a lot more on mine than most people can on gimp, including mass-automation. The downside is that if I have too much space on my hard drive the software assumes I have zero space on my hard drive and wont' boot up, so I had to install hundreds of gigabytes of games to get it to run. XD

Speaking of licensing. The weird part about AI art? You can't copyright it as-is. Companies cannot legally copyright works generated with their model. That's also why you don't see a lot of big companies (knowingly) using AI art because it could feasibly mean losing the rights to their IPs. That's why I see AI art more as the tool of the indie game dev and hobbyist rather than that of the big companies.

Also, here's a thought for you. There are some prompts that you can get on sites like prompt base to generate entire sheets of sprite art. That may help you in your quest to get 500,000,000 NPCs. I mean heck, even if you only pull about 3 sprites per sheet you're at least cutting those generations down to a third.

Anyways, take care and best of luck. Cheers!

Fair enough. In retrospect I admit I really should have phrased my review a bit better. What I should have said is that I know of AI that can get close-enough to a pixelated style to create some very impressive images with some minor alterations. And that's my bad, my apologies. I've also softened my views on Retro Diffusion since I first wrote that review as the style has grown on me even if I don't use it. It does do something that is fairly unique in the AI field (at least as far as I know) and for that it is a great service that I hope to see further refined. If you feel that it's worth the cost, then don't let me dissuade you. By all means use it, I won't judge. I'm sure Mr. Astropulse would appreciate your business and perhaps use the money to make better models for us in the future.

Still, I didn't want you to go away empty-handed so I've got two quick examples below that I think can illustrate that other AIs can make some very pretty sprite art. Please note that I did shrink these down to 128x128 pixels in my (20-year-old) version of Photoshop using 'nearest neighbor' resampling to make them look more convincing as pixel art as the original images did have some odd artifacting. Still, I think it should help illustrate what these two can do for some very convincing sprite art with the software. With a few alterations these could be indistinguishable from the genuine article.

Anyways, best of luck to you. Cheers!

Knight Portrait: Created in Bing AI using a custom pixel art prompt I created.

Man with Barrel: created with Chat GPT requesting a picture of a man struggling to lift a barrel in a sprite art style.

Right on! Best of luck on your game project! :D

Thanks for the feedback, some very useful info. And it's a fascinating thing on the CPU usage, it makes a lot of sense given the nature of AI. Keep up the great work. :)

     Alright, so this is an attempt to make a fair and balanced review. Instead of telling you whether or not you should get it, I'll give you my first takes on this software as raw data and let you decide for yourself, cheers.

Pros

•  Firstly, I can attest that this software does indeed work. (Included below, it's not a great chest but it's what I got on my first try.) And I've included a cute little image of a chest that I made to test it out.
• Specialized with Aesprite which means that you can immediately get to working on the sprite as soon as it rolls in.
• Creates sprite art in a more niche market for game developers in a popular sprite-making software.
• Has cute little beep noises to let you know which parts of the process you're on and when it's done.
• Has differentiated models for portraits, objects, architecture, etc.
• The tiling feature does work. (Example shown below.) Sadly it seems fairly limited and does stone and grass textures more than things like wall textures and floorboards, etc.

Cons

• The price. At the time of writing it's a whopping $65. This is fairly shocking as there's already other models out there that can handle sprite art very well without a lot of the downsides that this one has. 
• It has you install Python and Git, which for some can be pretty scary and some more paranoid folks would want to know that coming in for fear of computer hijackings, data theft and the like. If I suddenly go quiet or start acting funny on here, or this account becomes a glaringly good review, you know what happened. :)
• I couldn't actually get this thing to make a character portrait... I tried a few times and in a few different ways and it just never created one. I got some cute full-body sprite art, but not portraits. Also I noticed that while the AI is very cute and does the style well, it has trouble creating what you're describing and tends to default to something close but not quite. (Example of the little fox-monk I tried to get as a portrait but instead got full-body sprite of art included below.)
• Speed and CPU use may be problematic for some. My PC actually started to overheat a little and the only other time I've had that happen was running a game of UEBS 2 with a truly disgusting number of troops deployed. I can't for the life of me figure out why this would cause my CPU to overheat like that where cutting edge games don't. But I'm not exactly an AI expert.

Well, if you can figure it out where I couldn't. I will be extremely interested in adding your vst to my list. In the preview it sounds amazing. :)

I'm not sure how the others work, but Acid 10 allows you to select the exact folder it's in and scan that for the software. Unlike others you don't need to have a specify install folder. Does Soraboy itself require it to be that folder?

And no worries, some VSTs just don't seem to work with it. Though I've never been able to figure out why. :)

Picked this up hoping I could run it on Acid 10 run on Windows 10 sadly it doesn't load. If I had to hazard a guess, I've noticed that 64 bit vst's just doesn't load with the software. A shame, I liked the sound of this one.

Keep up the outstanding work. I'm really loving it so far. :)

Very cool! Best of luck on your game. :D

Thanks so much. I wish you both the best of luck and am excited to see what you come up with.

Thanks, I greatly appreciate it. After all, what's a fantasy game without some strange creatures to populate it? Best of luck. :)

Hi there! I love what I'm seeing so far. However most of the settings I work on have at least a few non-humnoid races, such as animal folk, machines, etc. Are there any plans to have more exotic races included? Thanks in advance. :D

Aww, thanks so much! I appreciate it. I hope the music serves you well. :)

Not so much jealous as I see these as kind of a scam. You can get art like this elsewhere for free, and more tailored to your needs, but he's charging money for them.

But hey, if you wanna get scammed and insult those trying to warn you. Be my guest. Far be it from me to keep a petulant fool from his overpriced spoils. ;)

He used a GAN, probably Artbreeder.com. XD

Outstanding! Great work! :D

If you'd like you can link here for ease of use. I'm alright with just having my name in the credits if that's inconvenient. Also that sounds really cool! I can't wait to see it. :D

A great sfx pack, has a lot of sounds that would be amazing for sci fi military scenarios.

From one composer to another, great work. I'm very impressed and can't wait to see more from you. :D

Thanks, I'll pass it on to Rasul. I know he'll appreciate it. :)

No problem!

I'd love to see generators like this one for various fantasy races. Kobolds, orcs, goblins, etc. I could see something like this being very useful for running ttrpg games on roll20. :)

I absolutely love this thing. Some of the random portraits I've rolled up have actually given me a legitimate gut laugh. Here's to hoping you do more of these, cheers! :D

Thanks so much. :)

Thanks so much! You just made my week.

I agree. I love using dark tones with chiptunes and synths. It's a shame that more people don't do it, chiptunes and retro-synth music have a lot of untapped potential.

I absolutely love this program! Well done! I really would like to use this for something, but I'm not sure what yet. Maybe a megagame or something like that?

Update: Found a fix. Apparently you need to update to the most recent version of the maker for them to show up. Though apart from recognizing the new files the new version doesn't seem to have any other updates. That's odd, but at least it works now.

Just tried installing this one. I added the standalone .pack file to the Packs folder per usual, but none of the assets load.

Sure, I'll write you on Facebook.

Thanks for the link, it's so cool to see the game in action. The game turned out great, very awesome! I absolutely love the retro, SNES-era aesthetic.

If we work together in the future, I could compose some custom music for the stages. I can also do quite a bit more than retro game music as well, that's just what I post here for now. Thanks again for using my music, it's always been a dream of mine to be part of a game-development team. You've made my dream come true. :)

Thanks for using my music, please let me know if you'd like to work together on future projects sometime. :)

No problem. Checked them out, gotta commend you on your lineart skills, man. Great stuff.

This is some truly outstanding artwork, and a breathtaking deal for the price. Thank you so much for this. I don't have a use for these (yet) but thought I'd give you a little money anyway to show my support. :)

I like your work, great stuff. I don't have a use for these (yet), but it's clear you've got quite a bit of talent there and I like to support folks on here. Please enjoy the tip. :)

Oh wow, that's awesome. Thanks so much for using my music for your game. That means a lot to me. I just looked up the game and I'm very excited to see the final version. Best of luck. :)

Thanks. :)