Timestorm Baseball: Founding Father Revamp 1

In yesterday’s post, I shared how the early build of Timestorm Baseball was a mess of diffusion images and partially constructed baseball stadiums. In this post, I’ll share with you examples of cleaning up some of the sprites as I attempted to build quality around the generated sprites.

The cartoon like baseball sprites are pretty fun, even if they came out of the generator wrong. For example, this sprite features a player wearing two gloves. It’s an interesting thought-what if every player had two gloves instead of one-but it is not what I was going for in Timestorm Baseball.

Multiple failed attempts at animation poses came in, as well. The nice thing about generating images on your own hardware is that the cost is free. The bad thing is that it takes real effort to solve for these kinds of animation problems. I do believe that they’re fixable as just an engineering puzzle, but not in the few days of the challenge.

You can see in these examples that the sprites are almost great. It’s why I believe this is a fixable situation. And as is true with most things AI, as time went on the problem space narrowed and things improved until that final 5% became clear that “OK, I’m not going to have time to solve this before the due date.”

It’s like a game of where’s Waldo. Only in this game you look for every single error in the image. There were games for kids that were exactly like this before video games became as common as water. You’d have a printed picture to occupy your time with finding all the mistakes. Consider this one, can you spot all the flaws?

Here’s a more detailed example of one image and the prompt work that went into it.

Let’s talk about Sam Adams.

In the post I shared about building on Paul Revere Sam Adams makes an appearance to power up your ride with beer from his brewery. It was a fun exercise. Naturally, Sam Adams needs to make an appearance in Timestorm Baseball.

The image (which I particularly enjoy):

The prompt:

{
  “positive”: “pixel art sprite, Samuel Adams as a first baseman baseball player, full body idle stance facing camera, feet planted, arms relaxed, clear neutral pose, stout frame, gray side curls, round determined face, green waistcoat trim cue, cream and navy vintage baseball uniform, small SA cap mark, navy socks, first baseman ready stance, large glove, wide base, full body, one complete character, game asset, crisp black outline, limited color palette, readable face, centered with generous padding, perfectly flat solid #00ff00 chroma-key background, no floor, no cast shadow, no contact shadow”,
  “negative”: “same generic player, cloned face, face drift, different uniform, green clothing, cropped body, cropped head, cut off feet, extra limbs, detached limbs, dismembered body, duplicate player, low contrast, blurry, realistic photo, 3d render, painterly, text on jersey, watermark, logo clutter, stadium background, field background, dirt ground”,
  “settings”: {
    “seed”: 76184293,
    “width”: 512,
    “height”: 512,
    “steps”: 4,
    “cfg”: 1.0,
    “sampler”: “euler”,
    “loraStrength”: 1.12
  },
  “historyStatus”: {
    “status_str”: “success”,
    “completed”: true,
    “messages”: [
      [
        “execution_start”,
        {
          “prompt_id”: “53cdc383-3c1e-4b0f-982e-0beaa1a30110”,
          “timestamp”: 1781802716676
        }
      ],
      [
        “execution_cached”,
        {
          “nodes”: [],
          “prompt_id”: “53cdc383-3c1e-4b0f-982e-0beaa1a30110”,
          “timestamp”: 1781802716678
        }
      ],
      [
        “execution_success”,
        {
          “prompt_id”: “53cdc383-3c1e-4b0f-982e-0beaa1a30110”,
          “timestamp”: 1781802971238
        }
      ]
    ]
  }
}

Here’s the sprite with alpha corrections if you want to use it.

I covered a few times the utility of building little tooling websites to review your generated sprites. Here’s the list of sprites, the model, source, and sheet reviews.

Not quite where Timestorm Baseball ended up, but I do like the mood and aesthetic!