I know exactly what you're talking about since I've tried to make game graphics too. If the backgrounds of your game are mostly going to be dark, render over a black background. You can replace the pure black with magenta later with a paint bucket operation. Your sprite will have a blackish outline, but it won't be so noticable against the dark background. If your backgrounds are going to be varied colours then you may just have to put up with pixelation. I'm not sure, but I think the way proffessional game programers most often do it is they use fast advanced anti-aliasing operations to smooth the pixelated sprite against the background during gameplay. Some such operations may be related to alpha blending. Of course, not so many years ago, game graphics just weren't anti-aliased at all.

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