Hey hey 👋 We’re building two things right now:

SpriteDX: a tool to generate living, breathing pixel characters from layers and prompts
Machi: a side-scrolling world full of quirky, AI-driven characters doing their thing

Naturally, we ran into a very indie dev problem:

🎨 There’s no standard for sprite sheets.
Everyone does it differently. Everyone thinks they’re right.

Frame order? Walk cycles? Layer structure? Animation states? If you’re working solo, you can kinda wing it. But if you want to scale, remix, or bring others into the mix, you end up with a spaghetti pile of mismatched assets.

So we asked ourselves:
Do we really want to create yet another sprite sheet standard?

Spoiler: Not really.

What’s LPC and Why Does It Matter?

Enter LPC, a.k.a. Liberated Pixel Cup—an open art initiative that tried to solve this exact issue back in 2012.
It gave pixel artists and game devs a shared language:

Consistent character proportions
A fixed set of animation states (walk, attack, hurt, idle, etc.)
Layered character pieces (body + clothes + gear, etc.)
Licensing that makes reuse and remixing safe and legal

It’s not perfect. But it’s a thoughtful system that a whole community has built upon. And that’s the part we love.

We’re not married to LPC—but we’re definitely inspired by it.

Stealing the Good Stuff (with Credit)

Here’s what we’re taking from LPC and applying to SpriteDX and Machi:

Animation State Templates: Having a shared vocabulary like “walk_north” and “slash_east” is useful even if our characters don’t look like LPC ones.
Modular Layering: Designing with reusable pieces (like hats, cloaks, body types) makes both AI generation and character assembly way more scalable.
Pose Consistency: A predictable base pose helps us align different animations and apply effects cleanly.
Community-Friendly Licenses: If we borrow assets or share ours, we want to play nice. LPC’s CC-BY-SA approach is a good baseline to consider.

So no, we’re not cloning LPC—but we’re not ignoring it either. It’s one of the few efforts out there that actually tried to bring order to the pixel chaos. Respect.

What About Other Options?

We also explored:

Kenney assets – great for tiles, UI, and prefab game kits, but not modular for layered characters
Open Pixel Project – open and lovely, but different style and not focused on animation structure
Rolling our own format – maybe… but only if we can’t reuse what’s already out there

The dream is to build something that’s compatible where it matters, but still flexible and modern. If we’re going to build tools to generate sprites, we want to plug into the world—not wall ourselves off from it.

Where We’re Headed

For now, we’re experimenting. We might adopt parts of LPC. We might cook up our own remix. But we’re not starting from zero, and neither should you.

If you’re an indie dev or pixel artist figuring out how to handle sprite sheets:

Take a look at LPC’s structure
Steal what works
Avoid going full galaxy-brain unless you really need to

You can always innovate on top of a standard—not around it.

Quick Links

We’ll post more updates soon as we finalize our own spec. For now, we’re just trying to avoid the trap of “custom everything forever.” There’s beauty in reuse—and less crying.

🧪💾🎮

[Pixel Post] Liberated Pixel Cup - Let’s Not Reinvent the Sprite Sheet