Street Characters (Updated to v2!)
Retro Cybercity Street Characters
Street samurai making side alley deals. Corporate ninjas hunting down a data thief. Regular people keeping their heads down while the world falls apart around them. Kids playing in broken streets. Androids slowly integrating with human civilization even as it grays out.
What kind of people might you expect to find in the decaying, busy streets of a futuristic dystopia?
This asset pack is for creators who are looking to try a cyberpunk or futuristic scifi aesthetic that takes cues from the analog era of the 1980s and 90s. Think Blade Runner or Ready Player One with an SNES/SEGA Genesis style color palette.
It includes a diverse set of character sprites with walk cycles ready for your game project, united by a "city streets" theme. The pack is top-down perspective and scaled at 16x16. It can be used in various game development engines, including Unity and RPGmaker. The pack uses the palette BLKNX64 by @blkirl.
What Does It Include?
This pack includes 40 Total Character Sprites w/basic, 3-Frame Walk Cycles. Includes:
- 6 "Hero" Characters (now 10 with several variants included)
- 4 Android characters
- 4 Kid characters
- 2 Mechanic characters
- 2 Street Samurai characters
- 2 Corporate Ninja characters
- Various diverse civilian characters
- and more!
Will There be Updates?
This pack is launching complete but there will be more additional character packs in a range of subthemes eventually. I will update this pack with fixes as needed.
UPDATE 1:
- Corrections on a few sprites that had flipped elements improperly flipped. They are now flipped properly. So don't flip out.
UPDATE 2:
- MASSIVE update with v1.5 designs for ALL included characters. Each has far more detail now, animated elements such as hair or clothes, etc.
- I have also added FOUR new "hero" characters incl. one human w/ three variants and three new android designs
- v1 will remain in the pack in case anyone prefers that version!
Update 3:
- Another MASSIVE update with BETTER v2 designs for all included characters. These incorporate the same detail that was added previously in the update I am now calling "v1.5" to be even more confusing.
- This version also has sprite sheets set up to be more compatible with RPGmaker, though you will still need to add $ or ! (or both) to the filename depending on your needs.
- These new TRUE v2 designs include left-facing variants where applicable -- I used to universally flip the sprites for traditional reasons (laziness) but not anymore.
- This update brings this pack in line w/ all other character sprite assets in my shop so that they are consistent and can still be used together if you don't mind the color palette shift or recolor them yourself.
- As usual, I am still including the "legacy" versions of these sprites for those who prefer them. If you want to use the new stuff, use the "TRUEv2" version.
An example of the new versions, from the rear where a lot of changes were made even compared to other angles on the sprites:
Licensing
Please note, by purchasing and downloading this product, you are agreeing to the following licensing terms:
What You Can Do:
- Use in commercial and non-commercial games, personal projects, or public domain projects.
- Sell works created using this asset, eg: a video game.
- Modify assets for your own use in personal or commercial projects. For example, reorganizing tile sheets, adjusting size, or mixing and matching assets, recolors.
- Publish work using this asset on websites relating to art, games, and similar.
What You Cannot Do:
- Resell the original or any modified version.
- Use the assets or derivatives in logo, trademark, or service mark.
- Use these assets for AI anything, generators, code-based art tools, or NFTs.
Contact & Support
I am open to suggestions and feedback and am quick to respond to comments here. I am always looking forward to seeing what YOU make with my assets.
I am best reached through email: hedgewizardgame@gmail.com or by commenting right here on itch. Especially if I don't check my email enough! You can find me on tumblr where I post art almost daily. I make other art as side projects or for fun. Any time I really get a bug to make game assets outside of my own projects and commissions, I'll probably put them on it
ch! If you'd like to commission my work or are simply curious to see more of it, please check out my tumblr or my Artstation page. I usually appreciate feedback, so please feel free to comment.
Purchase
In order to download this asset pack you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $2.99 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Development log
- Sprite V2 UpdateOct 29, 2022
Comments
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Hello, they look very beautiful and I intend to purchase them for use in RPG Maker MV/MZ. I’m also looking for characters with a more space theme, with space suits, with and without helmets, do you have something similar? A package with robots would also be cool, besides the ones I see here. If it does, I’ll be happy!
I do have a theme called “Offworld Colonies” that is in the early stages. It won’t be ready for some time, though. It will have more space themed stuff. As for robots, that is a good idea. I have given some thought to making a robot pack for this theme and probably will in the future. Retro Cybercity does have robots, it’s just that what you’re seeing for the most part aren’t robots but androids. An example of a robot in the theme would be the serving robots in the “Vendors” tileset.
Keep an eye on my stuff. Because of your interest, I’ll try to do some of these things sooner rather than later if possible.
Hey, were you able to get the characters to walk correctly? I put them in my game (RPG Maker MZ) and they're walking backwards. Should I reorganize the sprite sheet or is there an easier fix to this?
This is happening because the spritesheets aren’t set up for RPGmaker by default. To fix what you’re seeing, all you have to do is change the 2nd and 3rd row. RPGmaker is set where 2nd row faces left, 3rd row faces right. For boring workflow reasons, mine are flipped. I think in the future I’ll release my packs with this changed, since it’s a lot easier than making tilesets RPGmaker compatible and I don’t think having it flipped around again will hurt users who work with different engines.
If you bought other assets of mine, you’re going to run into this problem again. Especially with tilesets. I used to include a lot of variants, including RM-compatible ones but it was a lot of extra work for no clear benefit. My Nine Realms stuff is RPGmaker compatible, but it hasn’t increased sales so it’s kind of a cost-benefit question. For now, at least.
My product pages do include a warning about this and some basic instructions for reorganizing spritesheets to suit your needs. I currently assume that flexibility is better, and that my buyers will know spritesheet standards, but these may not be good assumptions. More feedback like yours helps a lot in guiding how I should do things going forward, so thank you.
I truly appreciate your reply. I do also hope that you make more RPG Maker compatible assets, but I truly do understand where you're coming from.
I will at least make character sheets more RPGmaker-friendly in the future. Tilesets will probably continue as is, but it’s pretty easy to reorganize those into the proper formatting. I can probably at least make them the right size to plug into RPGmaker. One of the reasons I don’t is so I have some space between the assets so it’s clearer to the user that this is a floor, that’s a wall, etc. Not that they have to follow that, I just understand that a little guidance helps.
Anyways, appreciate your feedback and let me know if I can be of any more help.
Speaking of RPG Maker do you have a pack like this with RPG Maker format autotiles?
I intend to use in a traditional roguelike, for building procedural neighborhoods, so I'm essentially looking for street and wall autotiles. That plus your characters and objects would make it perfect.
I don’t have autotiles in this theme but that is something I will eventually add. I have some beginning stages plans to update the whole theme to be more RPGmaker compatible out of the box. When I do that, I’ll add autotiles where appropriate. I wish I could say it would be soon but I’m pretty slow in general (this is a side-gig for now) so expect this update down the line somewhere. Early 2024?
That said, I appreciate the suggestion a lot. I have always wondered if I should have just ate the extra time and made this all more RPGmaker compatible to begin with. At the time, I was working in Unity a lot but in the last year I’ve been doing A LOT of RPGmaker stuff so I’ve definitely become more comfortable with how they format tilesets and whatnot. I also tried to make Nine Realms compatible, including autotiles, but this did not seem to boost sales so I have opted to save myself time and not try it again. I made that decision over a year ago, however, so it seems time to revisit it.
If more people speak up in support of this idea, I’ll definitely make it a bigger priority. I am interested in what users want to see in these packs but I’m fairly small still so there isn’t a whole lot of feedback or requests like yours.
Thanks again!
Oh yeah, I get you. I'll keep an eye out then.
Thanks for the reply, have a nice one!
Hi there.
This is an issue of scale mismatches in your assets. In older versions of these packs, I included three sizes for different RPG makers or engines. 16x16, 32x32, and 48x48 (a weird size that MV/MZ use). I did not make 64x64 assets by default for anything, though you can double the 32x32 or 4x the 16x16 to achieve this result.
However, I changed how I packaged more recent assets like the Free Cyberpunk character pack and some of the other packs. I no longer include all three sizes. Just the 16x16 because it can be manually resized by users very easily with graphics software like GIMP or Aseprite.
Can I ask, what RPGmaker or Engine are you using? Do you have a graphics program like GIMP or Aseprite?
If you do, you can probably fix this by taking the 16x16 characters you want to use and rescaling them 4x to work on a 64x64 tilemap. Personally, I develop in MZ and the default is 48x48 so my usual method is to upscale 3x to get a screen/resolution scale like this:
Different art style with different default scale, but you get the idea. With the same scale assets, but from a different theme, this is what Nine Realms looks like in RMMZ when scaled 3x to be 48x48:
This stuff can be complicated so please ask any questions. I should be able to help you fix this, but making 64x64 sprites is something you should be able to do easily without needing an update to the pack.
my mistake. is ok now. thanks!
Right on! No worries. It’s one of my least favorite things about doing art and dev, actually. The resolutions and scaling stuff always confuses me or I forget about it and mess up haha. I’m glad it’s working! Let me know if you need anything else and stay tuned for more Cyberpunk stuff!
Please also feel free to comment on any of the Retro Cybercity pages w/ progress on your project, if you feel like sharing. Would love to see what someone else makes with these assets!
These are so neat! Sci-fi is such an underrepresented theme in top-down assets. Very cool 😎
Thanks!
Are the assets in a psd or ai file? Thanks
They are all in png format, with two sets for each spritesheet, one includes a background color and the other with blank or transparency.
Hope that helps.
Thank you so much!
Hi there! These look great :) Do the characters have a walk cycle in 4 directions? And does this pack include those sweet sci-fi cars from the promo images? Thanks
Yes! The walk cycles are four-directional. I should probably make that clearer in the description!
The sci-fi cars (glad you like them!) aren’t fully ready yet, I only have the sideview sprites finished. I plan to release a vehicle pack down the road which will include more types of automobile, flying vehicles like helicopters and dropships, and more.
Nice! Helicopters and dropships would be very cool :)