When you’re making a game, you need art assets to render otherwise your game is going to look quite boring! You need backgrounds, tiles, sprites, and UI widgets to make it all come together.

My “starter” assets for my game were the ones that I pulled from the MDN’s Tiles and tilemaps overview which was limited but easy to work with. I used the tile sheet and wrote some code to split it into 64x64 tiles and indexed into an array.

As for the player character assets, I found a sprite at OpenGameArt.org that was in the right dimensions and had directional animation frames. I did the same process here: split the frames that I wanted into arrays, one for each direction (looking left, right, up, down). Given user input that moves forward in a direction, my animation code would loop through the directional array and swap in a different frame every few ticks.

Both of these were good enough for me to get started and get familiar with graphics programming. I do intend to swap them out once I get beyond the proof-of-concept stage.

I found these useful resources as well:

  • itch.io has a huge game assets section
  • kenny.nl has lots of different assets for different kind of games