Western Front: WW1 Top-Down Pixel Art, UI & Sound Pack

Everything you need for a top-down game on the Western Front: six armies with every animation a soldier needs, tanks and aircraft in 16 directions, villages that burn down in four stages, a terrain kit for building your own maps, a complete interface, fourteen ready-made battlefields and 345 sounds mixed to sit together.

It all shares one palette, one light and one scale, so the pieces fit the moment you drop them in.

What's inside

• 6 armies: British, French and German, each in 1914 kit and in 1916-18 steel helmets
• 6 roles: rifleman, officer, machine gunner, crewman and engineer in every army, plus a German flamethrower
• 14 animations in 8 directions for every role, death included, plus 12 dead and 4 wounded poses per army
• Cavalry for the three 1914 armies: standing, walk and gallop, and dead horses
• 8 crew weapons in 16 directions: three heavy machine guns, trench mortar, field gun, howitzer, anti-aircraft gun and anti-tank rifle
• 7 tanks and vehicles in 16 directions: Mark IV male and female, Whippet, FT light tank, A7V, armoured car and lorry
• 8 aircraft and 2 balloons in 16 directions, with shadow sheets and wrecks
• 19 buildings and field works in 4 states (intact, damaged, ruined, rubble) and a windmill with turning sails
• A terrain kit: 21 tile sets that join up in any layout (nine ground blends, trenches, roads, a stream and wire belts), with Tiled tile sets and an example map
• A UI kit: panels, buttons, tabs, sliders, bars and more in four colour themes, selection rings, 137 icons, cursors and map markers
• 29 trees and bushes with sway layers, crows and rooks that take off and fly
• 18 tileable ground textures at 64 and 256 px, animated water, 24 craters, 24 ground details, 20 decals, 14 defences, 9 props
• 75 effects: shell bursts, airbursts, fire and smoke loops, muzzle flashes, gas, impacts, projectiles, rain and snow
• 14 battlefield maps: seven fronts, before and after the fighting, up to 4096 x 3072
• 345 sounds (17 minutes) in WAV and OGG

1,914 PNG files and 17,195 frames in all.

Soldiers

Every soldier can idle, walk, run, aim, fire, kneel, fire kneeling, go prone, fire prone, crawl, throw a grenade, dig, fight hand to hand and fall. The officer carries a pistol, the crewman an ammunition box or a shell, the engineer a spade and a coil of wire. When a man is hit he falls forward with his weapon landing beside him, and his last frame is the body you leave on the field.

The uniforms follow the real kit. The French start the war in blue coats and red trousers and finish it in horizon blue under Adrian helmets. The Germans start in covered spiked helmets, and by 1916 everyone wears steel.

Guns, tanks and aircraft

Every machine is drawn at each of its 16 headings instead of being rotated, so the light, the shading and the shadow stay right whichever way it faces. Tanks drive, turn on the spot both ways, get damaged and burn out. The FT and the armoured car have separate turrets that turn on their own. Guns have idle, firing and packed-for-the-march sheets, and the index gives each one's muzzle point in every direction, so flashes land on the barrel.

Aircraft: Camel, SPAD, D.VII, R.E.8, DH.4, Br.14, Rumpler and the Gotha bomber, plus French and German observation balloons with a basket. Each comes with a shadow sheet you place on the ground below it, offset by its height, and a wreck for when it comes down.

Villages and the front line

Cottages, a farmhouse, a barn, a church, a chateau, a windmill, a well, a wayside shrine, haystacks and a cart. Behind the wire: a command post, bunker, dugout, gun pit, machine-gun nest, observation post, aid post and supply dumps.

Each one comes intact, damaged, ruined and as rubble. The houses, barn, church, chateau, shrine and cart also come turned three ways, relit so the sun still comes from the north-west.

Effects

Shell bursts in three sizes and in water, shrapnel and flak airbursts, fires and a smoke column that loop, muzzle flashes, smoke, dust, gas clouds, impacts, sparks, tracers, shells and grenades in flight, a flamethrower jet, rain, snow and cloud shadows.

Build your own battlefields

The terrain kit has 21 tile sets on a 64 x 64 grid. Nine blends take grass into mud, dirt, shell-torn earth, sand, snow, marsh, forest floor and water, and mud into water. Trenches with their fire bays, dirt and cobbled roads, a stream and belts of wire join up in any layout, as transparent overlays for any ground or ready-made on grass and mud.

Every set comes as a Tiled tile set with its terrain brush already set up, and an example map shows them working together. Godot and Unity users get a layout guide with every tile's corners or sides.

Ready-made battlefields

Flanders, the Somme, the Meuse heights, Champagne, the Argonne forest, the Vosges in winter and a large army front with three trench systems. Each map comes twice: before the battle, with the trenches dug and the country still green, and after it, with shell holes, churned earth and flooded craters. They are ground images, so put your own buildings, units and effects on top.

A complete interface

Panels for reading and for a HUD, a picture frame, tooltips, title bars, tabs, text fields, buttons in all four states, round buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, sliders and scroll bars, each in parchment, khaki, field grey and horizon blue. Health and progress bars in five colours, selection rings and corner brackets for your units and your targets, 137 icons for units, orders, alerts, resources and ranks, six cursors, map markers, and the flags and emblems of the three armies.

Everything that stretches is a nine-slice, and the index gives its borders and each cursor's hot spot.

Sounds

345 sounds balanced as one mix, so they work together straight away. Loud sounds come in up to three distances (near, mid and far) and most have several variations, so nothing repeats.

• Weapons (98): Lee-Enfield, Lebel and Gewehr 98 rifles, pistol, light and heavy machine guns, submachine gun, anti-tank rifle, flamethrower, field gun, howitzer, heavy gun, tank gun, trench mortar, grenades, flares, incoming shells and bombs
• Explosions (36): grenades, shells in three weights, flak, gas and smoke shells, falling debris
• Bullets (26): whizzes and cracks, impacts on dirt, mud, sandbags, wood, metal and water
• Battle textures (24): massed rifle fire at four densities and distant firefights, for filling out a big battle
• Vehicles and aircraft (13): tank engine and tracks, lorry, aircraft engine, flybys, aircraft machine gun, crashes, a balloon burst
• Ambience (10 stereo loops, 40 s each): wind, rain, heavy rain, distant battle, countryside birds, night crickets, trench life, a river, leaves
• Environment (25): thunder, gusts, fire, collapsing buildings, breaking timber, the officer's whistle, gas alarm, ringing ears
• Wildlife and village (65): skylark, songbirds, crows, pigeons, an owl, frogs, and far off a dog, a rooster, church bells, shouts and whistles
• Foley (17): digging, hammering stakes, barbed wire, sandbags, footsteps in mud, splashes
• Interface and office (31): clicks, confirm, cancel, orders, paper, field telephone, bells, klaxon, typewriter, rubber stamp

Easy to drop in

• Sheets are plain grids of square cells: one row per direction, one column per frame. The pivot is always the centre of the cell, so animations never jitter.
• sprites.json lists every file with its cell size, frame count, frame rate, looping, pivot and scale, plus muzzle points, nine-slice borders, cursor hot spots and the tile sets' corners and sides. The README has step-by-step notes for Godot, Unity, GameMaker and Tiled.
• Two pixel scales: the world at 1 pixel per world pixel, and everything that moves at 3, for extra detail. In Unity that's Pixels Per Unit 8 and 24.
• Shadows are baked in. If your engine rotates sprites instead, the Rotatable folder has east-facing, shadowless versions of the soldiers, guns, vehicles and aircraft.
• Palette files for Aseprite, GIMP and Krita.
• Sounds as WAV (44.1 kHz, 16-bit) and OGG, named by distance and variation, with a list of lengths and levels. Loops loop cleanly and machine-gun bursts chain.

Try it first

There's a free version with two riflemen, a machine gun, a cottage, trench and road tiles, an interface, effects, a map and 31 sounds: Western Front Lite. Same style and layout, so what you build with it keeps working when you upgrade.

License

Use the assets in as many games and projects as you like, commercial or not, and edit them as you please. Credit is welcome but not required. You can't resell or share the files themselves, on their own or inside another asset pack. The full text is in LICENSE.txt.

Not included

No fonts, portraits or music, and no layered source files: everything is PNG, WAV and OGG, plus the index and the Tiled files. The text in the screenshots is set in Tiny5 and Silkscreen, two free pixel fonts on Google Fonts.

Updates

Updates are free for everyone who bought the pack. If something you need is missing, or a sheet won't import the way you expect, leave a comment below.