Finding graphical tiles

This is an index into the various sites that provide tiles suitable for roguelike development. Some tilesets are designed to work with specific roguelike games.

When adding links, please make note of:

• The license for using the tilesets,
• Any games that the tilesets are designed specifically for,
• The size & style of the tiles.

These links are all external, as it isn’t really the place of RogueBasin to be hosting tilesets any more than it should be hosting roguelikes.

Orthographic

• The DawnHack Tileset by DragonDePlatino. An evergrowing collection of roguelike tiles, there are hundreds of animated tiles released for free under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.

• Ultimate Roguelike Tileset by Oryx Design Lab. Commercial (costs $25).

• Fantasy & Sci-Fi Roguelike Tilesets by DithArt. Commercial (costs $12).

• The RLTiles - Public domain with a request for attribution. A large collection of 32x32 orthographic tiles. Tilesets for NetHack and Crawl. Several 64x64 isometric tiles.

• A subset of tiles from Dungeon Crawl’s tileset (consisting of overhauled tiles from RLTiles) has been released under CC-Zero. Read more at their site: http://code.google.com/p/crawl-tiles/ or get the most recent crawl tiles at the Crawl Stone Soup git repository: http://git.develz.org/?p=crawl.git

• TomeTik - Free tiles of David E Gervais (32x32 tiles mostly designed for Angband, and 54x54 isometric tiles designed for Dungeon Odyssey, all released under Creative Commons v3 CC-BY), and Tiles of Henk Brouwer designed as a module for Dungeon Odyssey (unknown licensing).

• The Liberated Pixel Cup - Many 32x32 tiles and a few characters dual licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 and GPLv3 designed for public usage. Bases and some monsters included.

• Thomas Whetnall is working on several tilesets on his blog,. Released under the BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.

• POWDER has an artpack which contains numerous tiles, most under CC-BY. http://www.zincland.com/powder direct tar.gz link

• Dwarf Fortress has a good collection of ASCII tiles of various sizes: See the dwarf fortress wiki

• SLASH’EM, tiles released in 16x16, 32x32, 64x64 tiles. Released under the Nethack General Public License.

• Game Icons for gui use. Released under the CC-BY 3.0 license.

• Free pixel project from Squidi.net with more in the forum. Released under the by-nc-sa creative commons license. 16 x16 pixels.

• The Sheep Graphics: Public-domain sprite graphics and sprite construction kits at The Sheep’s Page

• Adam Bolt tiles. These are the 16x16 tiles for Angband. Redistribution and use, for any purpose, with or without modification, is permitted. [1]

• Tileset based on RPG Maker Ace graphics, requires a license for that to be used. But free after that. Maker likes to see a copy of the game. [2]

• Tangar’s tileset; 1-bit tileset in form of raster graphical font with various sizes (23 sized, from 5x8 to 24x36), for Windows and Linux. CC0 licence (though link is appeciated)

Isometric

• Reiner’s Tilesets - Freeware with attribution. Large isometric tiles and animated sprites.

• While not roguelike the tiles from The Battle of Wesnoth are released under the GNU General Public License and could also be usefull. 72x72 pixels isometric tiles, floor tiles are hex grid based.

Science Fiction

• The art made for AI Wars. No tilesets, but space ships. Free to use for indie developers as long as proper attribution is given.

Other useful links

• If you’d like to generate and manipulate graphical tiles at runtime from within the code instead of loading them from image files, so that they are “embedded” in the executable file, there is a C++, SDL-based library called XTiles which is especially suited for roguelike game graphics. It is very small and easy to use. The project appears to have been abandoned. An archive of the blog can be found at https://web.archive.org/web/20170410060324/http://xtiles.blogspot.com/, and the source code at https://sourceforge.net/projects/xtiles/files/. XTiles is open-source.

• Lost Garden also has some free graphic sets. These are not directly roguelike, but could still be useful.

• During 2009 Prof. Engd’s ????tag????re of Hypnopompic Hexadecimal Miniature Monsters has a new monster each weekday. Released under cc by-nc-sa license.