Western Front Lite: Free WW1 Top-Down Pixel Art, UI & Sounds

A free sample of the Western Front pack, with enough in it to make a small trench game: two riflemen with every animation, a machine gun, a cottage, trench and road tiles, an interface, bursts and fire, a battlefield map and 31 sounds. Commercial use is fine.

What's inside

• A British and a German rifleman (1916-18, steel helmets), each with all 14 animations in 8 directions: idle, walk, run, aim, fire, kneel, fire kneeling, prone, fire prone, crawl, throw, dig, melee and die. Dead and wounded poses too.
• A British heavy machine gun in 16 directions: idle, firing and packed
• A cottage, a haystack and a machine-gun nest, each intact, damaged, ruined and as rubble. The cottage also comes turned three ways.
• Tile sets for your own maps: a trench with its fire bays and a dirt road that join up in any layout, and grass giving way to mud, with Tiled tile sets
• An interface: the parchment theme's panels, buttons, tabs, checkboxes, sliders and more, health bars, selection rings, cursors, map markers, two flags and a set of icons
• The trench line: barbed wire, pickets, sandbags, stakes, a tank trap, a helmet, an ammo box, a dropped rifle and a barrel
• Nature: oaks and bushes with sway layers, a stump, a log, a burnt tree and a crow in flight with its shadow
• Ground: 5 tileable textures at 64 and 256 px, craters, ground details and decals
• Effects: shell bursts in two sizes, a fire loop, a muzzle flash, smoke, dust, dirt clods, a bullet impact and a tracer
• A 960 x 540 battlefield map with trenches, wire and shell holes, ready to play on

An interface to go with it

The parchment theme of the full pack's UI kit: panels, buttons in all four states, tabs, checkboxes, radio buttons, a slider, a scroll bar and a text field, with health bars, selection rings, cursors, map markers and 20 icons. Everything that stretches is a nine-slice. The text in the pictures is set in Tiny5 and Silkscreen, two free pixel fonts on Google Fonts.

Sounds

31 sounds as WAV (44.1 kHz, 16-bit) and OGG: Lee-Enfield and Gewehr 98 rifle shots near and far, a rifle bolt, heavy machine-gun bursts, incoming shells, shell and grenade explosions, bullet whizzes, cracks and impacts, an officer's whistle, footsteps in mud, digging, three interface clicks, and two stereo ambience loops (a distant battle and wind).

How it works

• Sheets are grids of square cells: one row per direction, one column per frame, the pivot at the centre of the cell.
• sprites.json lists the cell size, frame count, frame rate and scale of every file, the interface's nine-slice borders and cursor hot spots, and every tile's corners or sides. The README has import notes for Godot, Unity, GameMaker and Tiled.
• The soldiers, the gun, the crow and the effects are drawn at 3 pixels per world pixel for extra detail; the world art and the tiles at 1. Show the first at a third of their size, or scale the world up 3x.
• Shadows are baked in. The Rotatable folder has east-facing, shadowless versions for engines that turn sprites at runtime.

License

Use it in any number of projects, commercial or not, and edit it freely. No credit required. Please don't re-upload or resell the files themselves. The full text is in LICENSE.txt.

Want the rest?

Western FrontWestern Front, the full pack, has six armies with six roles each, cavalry, eight crew weapons, seven tanks and vehicles, eight aircraft and two balloons, nineteen buildings and field works, a windmill with turning sails, 21 tile sets, the whole interface in four themes with 137 icons, 75 effects, fourteen ready-made maps and 345 sounds. Same style and same layout, so anything you build with this sample keeps working when you upgrade.