GameTileNet: A Semantic Dataset for Low-Resolution Game Art in Procedural Content Generation

TL;DR

GameTileNet is a semantic dataset of low-resolution game tiles designed to support narrative-driven procedural content generation through visual-language alignment.

Contribution

It introduces a new dataset with semantic annotations for low-resolution game art, enabling improved AI-driven content creation and object detection in pixel art.

Findings

Provides semantic labels for 32x32 game tiles

Establishes a baseline for object detection in low-res game art

Supports narrative-rich content generation in PCG

Abstract

GameTileNet is a dataset designed to provide semantic labels for low-resolution digital game art, advancing procedural content generation (PCG) and related AI research as a vision-language alignment task. Large Language Models (LLMs) and image-generative AI models have enabled indie developers to create visual assets, such as sprites, for game interactions. However, generating visuals that align with game narratives remains challenging due to inconsistent AI outputs, requiring manual adjustments by human artists. The diversity of visual representations in automatically generated game content is also limited because of the imbalance in distributions across styles for training data. GameTileNet addresses this by collecting artist-created game tiles from OpenGameArt.org under Creative Commons licenses and providing semantic annotations to support narrative-driven content generation. The dataset introduces a pipeline for object detection in low-resolution tile-based game art (e.g., 32x32 pixels) and annotates semantics, connectivity, and object classifications. GameTileNet is a valuable resource for improving PCG methods, supporting narrative-rich game content, and establishing a baseline for object detection in low-resolution, non-photorealistic images. TL;DR: GameTileNet is a semantic dataset of low-resolution game tiles designed to support narrative-driven procedural content generation through visual-language alignment.