Alright, so this is an attempt to make a fair and balanced review. Instead of telling you whether or not you should get it, I'll give you my first takes on this software as raw data and let you decide for yourself, cheers.
Pros
- Firstly, I can attest that this software does indeed work. (Included below, it's not a great chest but it's what I got on my first try.) And I've included a cute little image of a chest that I made to test it out.
- Specialized with Aesprite which means that you can immediately get to working on the sprite as soon as it rolls in.
- Creates sprite art in a more niche market for game developers in a popular sprite-making software.
- Has cute little beep noises to let you know which parts of the process you're on and when it's done.
- Has differentiated models for portraits, objects, architecture, etc.
- The tiling feature does work. (Example shown below.) Sadly it seems fairly limited and does stone and grass textures more than things like wall textures and floorboards, etc.
Cons
- The price. At the time of writing it's a whopping $65. This is fairly shocking as there's already other models out there that can handle sprite art very well without a lot of the downsides that this one has.
- It has you install Python and Git, which for some can be pretty scary and some more paranoid folks would want to know that coming in for fear of computer hijackings, data theft and the like. If I suddenly go quiet or start acting funny on here, or this account becomes a glaringly good review, you know what happened. :)
- I couldn't actually get this thing to make a character portrait... I tried a few times and in a few different ways and it just never created one. I got some cute full-body sprite art, but not portraits. Also I noticed that while the AI is very cute and does the style well, it has trouble creating what you're describing and tends to default to something close but not quite. (Example of the little fox-monk I tried to get as a portrait but instead got full-body sprite of art included below.)
- Speed and CPU use may be problematic for some. My PC actually started to overheat a little and the only other time I've had that happen was running a game of UEBS 2 with a truly disgusting number of troops deployed. I can't for the life of me figure out why this would cause my CPU to overheat like that where cutting edge games don't. But I'm not exactly an AI expert.