CODING AGENTS

Game art your coding agent can read, not just look at

Your agent can scaffold a player controller in one pass and then stall on the sprite it is supposed to move. PX-Art is not another AI image generator — it is a workspace that connects AI generation, art-asset management and game engineering. Assets land inside a game project with their type, animation relationships, palette and tags intact, and an agent reads them back over a read-only MCP server.

Where the handoff breaks today

Code and art fail differently. Code has names, types and a compiler that complains. A PNG has none of that. When a coding agent is handed a folder of generated images, three things are missing at once, and no amount of prompting inside the image generator puts them back.

Generic image generator vs. an asset workspace

What PX-Art writes down when it generates

One account holds several game projects. Each game has fixed modules: characters, actions, effects, UI design, cards & icons, and maps. Every generated result lands in the matching module and keeps its type, its animation relationships, its origin and its tags. That record is the thing an agent can query later.

A style contract per game, colours per run

Art direction is set at the game level as a style key plus tags, so a sprite generated in week six still belongs beside one generated in week one. Colour scheme is picked per generation, which is what actually varies between a forest slime and a lava slime.

Characters, not loose images

A character can carry three-view sprites (front, side, back), a portrait, an avatar and a battle sprite, and eight facings: south, north, east, south-east and north-east are generated, while west, south-west and north-west are produced by mirroring their counterparts. Details of how identity is held steady across all of them are on the characters and animation page.

Scenes, not just sprites

The Arrange workspace places assets into a map or a full-screen UI and stores scene size, layers, coordinates, asset references and map cells. That is a data structure, so it can be exported as a Tiled map and read back node by node.

What an agent can pull

PX-Art exposes a read-only MCP server named perfectpixel-scene with twelve tools, grouped by what an agent is actually trying to do:

• Discover — list_games, list_game_structure, list_characters, list_asset_families
• Choose — search_assets, preview_assets
• Deliver — get_asset_downloads, get_scene_bundle
• Read a scene — get_scene_metadata, get_nodes, get_scene_region, analyze_layout

There are no write, generate or delete tools. The full protocol details, argument shapes and sample responses are on the MCP page.

Connecting Cursor, Codex or Claude Code

1. Create a game and generate somethingEven one character with a walk cycle is enough for the agent to have real structure to read.
2. Issue an MCP tokenTokens are issued per user and scoped to that user's own games. Any subscription payment or top-up purchase unlocks read-only MCP permanently.
3. Add the server to your clientCursor, Claude Code, Codex and other MCP-capable clients all take the same server entry.
4. Let the agent discover firstTell it to call list_games before anything else; every per-game tool needs the game id that call returns.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "perfectpixel-scene": {
      "url": "ENDPOINT_SHOWN_IN_YOUR_PX_ART_ACCOUNT",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_PX_ART_MCP_TOKEN" }
    }
  }
}

A worked example: "add a patrolling slime to level two"

1. You generate the artIn the characters module, produce the slime base image, then a looping walk and a one-shot hit reaction in the actions module.
2. You arrange the levelIn the Arrange workspace, lay the level-two tiles and drop the slime where it should spawn.
3. The agent orients itselflist_games then list_game_structure tells it which module and tag ids mean "enemies" and "level two".
4. The agent picks assetslist_characters gives it the slime and its related assets; search_assets narrows to the walk strip; preview_assets confirms it is looking at the right creature.
5. The agent takes deliveryget_scene_bundle returns the scene JSON, the Tiled map for map scenes, in-bundle paths for every dependency, a SHA-256 per file and short-lived download URLs. It writes them into the repo and verifies the hashes.
6. The agent writes the codeFrame count, fps and loop flag come with the asset, so the animation setup and the patrol state machine are written against real numbers rather than guesses.

Getting results into a game project

Nothing here is locked in. Human-side exports cover a plain ZIP with images and a manifest, sprite sheet PNG, GIF, an Aseprite-compatible pack, Tiled maps and tileset ZIPs. Scene bundles ship the scene JSON, the Tiled file, dependency paths and checksums together. There is a thin adapter on the Godot side; Unity support is not claimed. The manifest.pxart file inside a bundle is just the JSON entry point of the pack, not a format you have to adopt.

Limits and things to check

• Generation is probabilistic. Results are not guaranteed to match the description. Review assets yourself before they go into production.
• The video-based action pipeline depends on model obedience to a chroma-key background and a fixed camera. When the model does not comply, the run fails with a request to regenerate rather than delivering broken frames.
• Rights are your responsibility. Legally generated assets can be used commercially, but you still need to check third-party rights, applicable law and the terms of the AI providers involved. AI output is not guaranteed to be exclusive, nor guaranteed to be registrable as copyright.
• MCP is read-only. An agent can discover, inspect and take delivery. It cannot generate, edit or delete. Creation stays a human decision.
• The Arrange workspace wants a real canvas and precise mouse work. On phones you can browse assets and take notes, not compose scenes.
• Prompt engineering stays internal. The final assembled prompt sent to the model is never returned to the client, including in generation history.

Credits

Generation spends credits: 5 for a static image, 10 for a frame-based action, 18 for a video-based action, 10 for a spell, 15 for an effect, 25 for a UI kit and 2 per patch for local edits. Failed or partially failed runs refund the unfinished portion automatically. New accounts start with 20 credits. The creator subscription is 19 USD per month including 300 credits, and a one-time top-up adds 100 credits for 10 USD — formal checkout is still under review and not open yet. See pricing for the current state.

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