This guide is grounded in Max McVibe: Case of the Missing Reel, a Phaser 4 point-and-click adventure (verb interface, inventory, dialogue, cutscenes) set in a desert drive-in that's secretly a radio relay — with a Spriterrific-generated protagonist, NPC and animated props.
Verbs, not combat: the point-and-click animation set
Most sprite generators assume you want a walk cycle and an attack. Adventure games need a different vocabulary, and Spriterrific ships it as the point-and-click animation template: the protagonist was generated with nine verb animations — idle, walk, talk, interact, pick-up, use, examine, give, shrug — every one driven by the game's verb-coin interface:
All of it derives from one anchor — a three-quarter view chosen because adventure scenes are walked diagonally, with setFlipX covering the other direction:
Talk deserves the iteration budget. It's on screen through every dialogue line, and the project's run archive shows exactly that: half a dozen talk takes were generated and compared before one shipped. At 100 credits per take — with free frame re-picking on each — that's a cheap casting call.
Seated NPCs and mood-switched talk
The game's other speaking character, a radar-van operator, never stands up — so her anchor was generated seated, and idle plus two talk moods (worried and happy, switched by dialogue state) all derive from that seated pose. The pose lives in the anchor, so no animation can accidentally break it:
The popcorn machine next to her makes the other point: props are characters as far as the pipeline cares. It's a Spriterrific-generated 12-frame idle loop on the standard 256px grid, placed in the scene JSON as an animated actor. If it should move, generate it.
Close-ups: when 256px isn't enough
Adventure games render characters far larger than platformers do, and the project initially found its slim protagonist soft at conversation-scene sizes. The fix was to regenerate the cast at 512×512 frames with the open-source CLI (the hosted pipeline exports 256×256 grids) — same 5-column sheets, same loader config, double the texture detail at render scale. Here's the shipped talk sheet:
The loading code is the standard Phaser pattern from the Phaser sprite generator guide — only frameWidth/frameHeight change. One more production note from the project: chroma-key fringing on fine silhouettes (hat brims, slim limbs) was cleaned with the engine's despill pass rather than by hand.
Cost for an adventure cast
A character job (anchor + first two animations) is 290 credits; each further verb is a 100-credit action job. That prices the reference cast honestly: a nine-verb protagonist around 990 credits, the three-animation seated NPC around 390, and the animated popcorn machine around 130. Failed steps refund automatically. New accounts start with 500 free credits — a protagonist with four verbs, no card required — and the $12/month Starter plan adds 1,500 monthly credits (pricing).