This is a classic problem for people who didn't grow up making 8-bit pixel art. Typing "pixel art" into Nano-Banana only creates the illusion of pixel art, which quickly breaks down under modest scrutiny, particularly at larger resolutions.

That's why you can see "smeared edges," "fringing," etc.

Even a basic nearest neighbor downscale/upscale would have squashed some of the higher frequency noise.

OP: Look into palette reduction and pixel grids. This is a decent start as a post-processing tool for this stuff.

https://github.com/jenissimo/unfake.js

yes. i am more perceptive of bad art vs bad code. seeing so much bad generated art...everywhere...makes me wonder how much bad code is being put out there. art isn't load-bearing, but code can be.

1000%. That’s why I encourage wherever possible a strong emphasis on TDD (test-driven development) when using LLMs for agentic design. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than nothing.

real pixel art or not, it looks cooler and better than bad news baseball: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_News_Baseball

Haha or Slalom - which is just... Why do I have to stare at that the whole time I play?

https://mordenstar.com/other/slalom-for-the-nes

Yeah because it is AI pixel art :/ But something also seems off with the AA right now. Going to try to fix. Then, maybe sponsor some artist-made sprites later if there's interest in the project.

fine for prototyping! good news for you is there are a lot of talented people if you are ready to commit.

Any platforms you recommend? Fivver?

i'd look around /r/gamedev and /r/gamedevclassifieds