I enjoy a good traced ray, AI-upscaled texture, or 'hallucinated' frame as much as the next person, but I think pixel art remains an important part of any art team's tool kit. Pixel art offers far more than a nostalgic throwback appeal, capable of a level of expression that would give even the most photorealistic polygons a run for their money. So when I stumbled across the Isometric NYC city map project, I was at first properly stoked—and then deeply conflicted.
Isometric NYC is the one-man effort of Andy Coenen, attempting to render all of New York City in an isometric pixel art style distinctly reminiscent of the SimCity series. But rather than laboriously building this city pixel-by-pixel, Coenen has instead leveraged multiple AI agents to create this city map. The entire process required much more work than dashing off a handful of prompts, but you are perhaps beginning to understand my sense of conflict.
