Thanks! Like another user commented below, I think the appeal of the pixel art sprites is that at a lower level of detail it can feel really accurate. 10 different real life red jackets can all end up as the same pixel art representation but each person would recognize it as their jacket! It feels like a form of compression.

On prompting, you can get most of the way there in AI studio on Gemini 2.0 Flash (Image Generation) Experimental by uploading a picture and asking for "a high quality detailed pixel art sprite of this character." Most of the backend annoyance here was iterating to improve prompt adherence (characters not facing the same way, outfits changing between frames, etc).

I am extremely impressed. I literally put my hand fully in front of my face, and it got me spot on. My glasses were partially shown, as was my beard and hair.

That being said, the resolution is such that saying messy hair, full beard, and black glasses, would pretty much get it.