Lost Phantom / Games / Winter Is Here / Pixel art

Winter Is Here — the pixel art

Survivors and infected with full animation cycles, realistic winter structures, weapons, items, effects and seamless ground tiles. Everything is generated from tools/pixel-art/winter/ — a humanoid rig, one palette, and a keyframe list per animation.

The animations below are the shipped sprite sheets, playing. Each one is a single horizontal PNG stepped through with CSS steps() — no JavaScript animation, no preview render. What you see is the file Unity would slice.

Why a rig. A person is not a blob: a walk cycle is knees and elbows in counter-phase, and hand-placing that for every character × every animation is how a project ends up with three animations. The body is a skeleton of joint angles, each animation is a short list of keyframes, and the frames between are interpolated — so a new survivor is a new outfit over the same rig, and a new animation arrives for every character at once.

Loading…

The palette

A survival winter, not a Christmas one. Snow is blue-grey rather than white, skin is cold, fabric is drab — and the only saturated colours in the entire set are blood, fire and infected-green. Put one saturated red among twelve desaturated browns and the eye goes straight to it, which is exactly what you want when the red is a wound.

Using them

Each animation is one horizontal strip: slice it in Unity's Sprite Editor with Grid By Cell Count, columns = the frame count shown on the card. Set Filter Mode: Point and Compression: None or Unity smooths them back into mush. Characters are 48×48 at 48 Pixels Per Unit. Non-looping animations (death, rise) are marked — do not set them to loop. No sprite bakes in a ground shadow; the renderer draws its own.
Back to Winter Is Here All games