Pixel art characters
AI-generated pixel art characters for 2D games. Knights, warriors, mages, and more. Browse the collection or create your own.
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Pixel art character sprites
Knights, mages, rogues, villagers, soldiers, and RPG heroes. Over 33,000 character sprites, each downloadable as a PNG with a transparent background.
A character is the sprite a player looks at for the entire game, which makes it the one worth the most attention. It also carries a constraint nothing else in a game has. It has to stay recognisable while moving, at whatever size your camera sits at, against every background you'll ever put behind it.
Pick the size before anything else
32x32 is the answer for most 2D games. It holds enough pixels for a readable face and distinct clothing without demanding the detail that larger sizes make you commit to.
16x16 suits a top-down RPG with a party and enemies sharing the screen. At that size a character is a silhouette and a palette, nothing more, and trying to add a face wastes the pixels the outline needed.
64x64 and up is for characters the player sees close. Portraits, bosses, fighting-game sprites. Just know the cost, because every frame of animation now takes four times the work.
Silhouette before detail
Black out your character completely and look at the shape. If you can't tell a knight from a mage, no amount of shading will fix it.
Distinctive silhouettes come from asymmetry and from things that stick out. A staff, a cape, a hat with a bent tip, one pauldron rather than two. That's why so many memorable game characters have an odd hat, and it's a design decision rather than an aesthetic one.
From a still sprite to an animation
A single character sprite becomes a walk cycle in the Animator, which generates the frames from the one image you already have.
Four frames is the working minimum for a walk. Contact, passing, contact, passing. Eight is smoother and worth it for a player character, though for a background villager nobody will ever notice the difference.
FAQ
32x32 is the standard for a 2D game character and the best size to start at. Use 16x16 for a top-down RPG where many characters share the screen, and 64x64 or larger when a character needs facial detail or elaborate armor.
Four frames is the working minimum and reads correctly in most games. Six to eight gives noticeably smoother motion and is worth it for a player character you watch constantly.
Yes. Every character downloads as a PNG with a transparent background, free and with no account needed.
Yes. Open any character from its page in the Animator and generate a walk, run, idle, or attack cycle from the single sprite.
A sprite sheet is one image holding every frame of a character laid out in a grid. Game engines read the grid and play the frames in order, which is faster than loading dozens of separate files.