Attempting to design an app icon for a Chips Challenge fan game I’m working on. Going for something that looks like the fireball sprite in the original game with a hint more realism and tinted in the colour blue. For reference, here’s the original fireball sprite:

Fireball sprite in Chips Challenge

And here’s my attempt:

Blue plasma shaped like the fireball sprite in Chips Challenge

I started with Stable Diffusion to get the base image:

Stable Diffusion production of the image described in the caption
Prompt: a blue plasma fireball shaped like a throwing star with four points on a white background, pixel art

Then imported into Acorn to rotate it, colourise it, and distort it to look a bit closer to the original sprite.

Screenshot of Acorn showing the image produced by Stable Diffusion rotated and the effects applied to produced the final image.

Desaturating the original image got rid of the purple centre, then applying the Glowhoo and Hue Adjust effect recolourised it to the blue I was looking for (I’m not sure what the Glowhoo effect does, but it seems to adjust the colour based on the pixel intensity, so it was good enough for what I wanted). Finally, I added a Twirl Distortion effect to achieve the slight warp in the star.

And yeah, it’s not going to win any design awards, but it’s good enough for now.

Oh, and just for kicks, here was my first attempt of producing the sprite using Affinity Designer.

First attempt at the blue plasma logo, crafted within Affinity Designer

That’s definitely not going to win any design awards. 😂