UPDATE 022026.10.11The first real art pass

Setting the art direction

Ironfall gets its look. The art is generated with AI, then cleaned up pixel by pixel to a single locked palette, so characters, terrain, props, items and effects all sit together.

Characters (1 of 2): the survivor player and the raider types.

What's new

A 32-colour master palette, locked across all art.
Six characters: the survivor player, three raider types, a scout mech and a heavy mech.
Terrain with edges, a shoreline and roads.
About 70 props, structures, items, icons and effects.
A gallery page that shows every asset, so each can be checked against the style guide.

How it was made

Each asset starts with a written prompt in docs/ASSET_LIST.md. The prompt fixes the view (top-down 3/4), the lighting (top-left) and the background (flat magenta for characters, so it can be removed).
Higgsfield's nano_banana_pro generates the raw image. The first attempts went to fal.ai because the default route picked fal. After a direct instruction, every later generation was routed through Higgsfield, with the endpoint named in the call.
Python then removes the background, samples the image down to the native pixel grid and maps every colour to the palette. This is why the art shares one look.
Where the automatic downscale lost detail (nut and bolt, rivets, berries), a hand pass was drawn pixel by pixel in code grids. The lockpick and the barricade needed this.
Aseprite does the final step: it locks the palette, removes stray pixels, adds the outline, and exports the sheet and the JSON.
Across the whole project so far, the spend log records 165 generations: 25 through Higgsfield and 140 through fal.ai, for about $1.85 in dollars. Most of the fal calls came before the instruction to use Higgsfield first. Higgsfield used credits, not dollars.

Screens

Characters (2 of 2): the raider brute, the scout mech and the heavy mech.

Terrain autotile set: grass, road, rubble and water, with edges, corners and shorelines over a dirt base.

Base building pieces: walls, door, crate, storage chest, workbench, campfire, turret and bed.

Wasteland props: barrels, wrecks, dead tree, boulder, barricade, signpost, fence and bones.

Item icons and UI frame pieces: panel, button, inventory slot, bar, tooltip and cursor.

Effects: sparks, smoke, explosion and dust.

Tools used

Higgsfield (nano_banana_pro)	AI image generation for the raw art. Used through the Higgsfield MCP connection in Asset Forge, which costs credits, not dollars.
Asset Forge	The studio that sends prompts to the generators, keeps the spend ledger and stores the raw images.
Aseprite	The clean-up stage: palette lock, outline pass, shading fixes and sprite-sheet export.
Python (Pillow, NumPy)	Image steps before Aseprite: background removal, downscaling to the true pixel grid, colour quantising, and the palette checks.

How to try it

Open the project in Godot 4.7 and press Play to see the art in the game world.
The gallery page shows every asset: docs/screenshots/if_a_r7_gallery_0_characters_a.png.

Known issues

Some icons and props are still being refined.
Raider and mech sprites read a little speckled at the largest size.

Ironfall dev log · Update 2 of 18 · All updates