Pixel art items & props

Pixel art items and props for 2D games

Swords, potions, shields, chests, keys, barrels, food, furniture, and the hundreds of small objects a game world is actually made of. This is the biggest collection in the gallery.

Items are where a game's art style gets set, oddly enough. A player looks at a sword icon in an inventory far longer than they look at the character sprite running past. If the set is inconsistent, this is where it shows.

Silhouette decides everything

An item sprite has to be identifiable at 32x32 with no label attached to it.

Put four of your items side by side at their real size and look away, then back. The one you have to think about is the one whose outline is wrong. Color and shading won't rescue a shape that reads as a generic blob, and this is the test that matters before any detail work starts.

Distinct outlines beat detailed interiors every time at this resolution.

Keeping a set consistent

Three rules hold an item set together, and they're worth more than the quality of any single sprite in it.

• One outline color. A shared dark tone, usually not pure black, around every item in the set.
• One light direction. Pick upper-left and never deviate. Mixed lighting across an inventory is immediately obvious even to players who couldn't name what's wrong.
• One palette. Reuse the same metals, the same woods, the same glass. Items that share colors read as belonging to the same world.

Pull a palette off a sprite you already like with Palette extractor and build the rest of the set from it.

Sizes for inventories and hotbars

32x32 is the default and suits most inventory grids. 16x16 works for a dense hotbar where a dozen items sit in a row. 64x64 earns the space in a shop window or an item-detail panel, where the player is deliberately looking closely.

Whatever you pick, use it for the entire set. A mixed-size inventory is the fastest way to make a finished game look unfinished.