Taquito began as an AI-generated sprite sheet that looked like pixel art but had no pixel grid under it. Resampled, she drifted and changed shape between frames, so from September 28 to 30 I rebuilt her. The player above runs five of her states.
A nearest-neighbor shrink had already lost her eyes. At 12 to 14 pixels wide she lost her ears, and a 1-pixel outline made her stop looking like a chihuahua. The next version went back to the sheet, the reference for every decision.
Sample the sheet for the head
I painted her a rounder head and asked for options. Sampling the sheet to 18 by 17, her size then, showed a 2 by 2 eye, where mine was 1, set further back on a boxy head. In her sitting frame below, c is cream, o orange and k black.
......ccc.......
......cooc......
......coooc.....
......coodccc...
......codccccc..
.......cdccccc..
........ccckkc..
.......cccckkcck
......ccccccccc.
......ccccccccp.
..c..ccccccc....
..cc.ccccccc....
...cocccsccc....
...ooocs.ccs....
..cdoocs.ccs....
..ccccs..ccs....
...ccccc.cccs...The kk square is that eye.
Legs that rotate
The walk borrows from Pedro Medeiros’ quadruped walk, the Stardew Valley dog and the NES Duck Hunt dog. The second try is what a sliding leg looks like, and it’s why every leg in the final walk rotates. The one I kept moves the legs in diagonal pairs, each going contact, drag, push, rise, swing, reach. If one planted paw steps 3 pixels while the others step 1, that foot reads as going backwards, so each planted paw moves the same distance every frame.
Rest on one frame
Sitting beat standing and a front view as her resting pose, because it can’t pass for a paused walk. The walk reaches it through a 4-frame sit-down that needed only two new drawings, since her head never moves.
The first idle moved her head, tongue and tail on one frame and popped. Now the tail moves on odd frames, the head settles on 4 and lifts on 8, and the ear twitches on 6.
As my animated sidebar icons do on their static drawing, poo and ball start and end on the sitting frame. The player checks that pixel for pixel before chaining them into “All, linked”. The walk doesn’t start or end there. She stands up first, the sit-down played backwards, and on a wide screen the scrubber labels it “stand”.
Frames in a text file
Rows of letters diff cleanly and read like a drawing, and Dash in dashhound is stored the same way. The paint tool I built names her parts, so “the hind leg” means exact pixels. Claude Code worked as the in-betweener, drawing candidate frames and studies; I picked from them, painted over them and set the rules. One rule was “this sheet is the truth”, and I answered near-copies of one idea with “you are guessing”.
Her sleep, a back view sampled from the sheet at 14 by 16 pixels, doesn’t link yet and stays out of the player. The paint tool is online, loaded with the same five states.