Clockwork City – Steampunk Side-Scroller Pixel Art Tileset & Asset Pack (16x16)

Build a whole steampunk city in 16x16 side view. This side-scroller pixel art tileset runs from a gaslit high street with market stalls and a gear fountain, up across chimney rooftops and an airship dock, through a roaring gear factory and foundry and inside the great clocktower, and down into the canals and sewers below. It has 2460 assets, including 222 animated props and 56 fully animated characters, enemies and critters. Everything comes in four palettes: hazy day, amber sunset, gaslit night and industrial smog.

Bundle deal: get this pack and the other 13 16x16 side-scroller packs for $19.99 in the Complete Side-Scroller Pixel Art Collection.

2460 assets · 16x16 grid · 1287 tiles · 865 props · 222 animations · 56 characters · 7 parallax backgrounds · 4 palettes · Tiled-ready

• 1287 tiles, including 119 animated canal water, sewer sludge, molten metal, hot oil, furnace grates, conveyor belts and lit windows.
• 10 auto-tiling terrains (47-tile blob sets with Tiled terrain brushes): cobble street, soot brick, red brick, civic stone, riveted iron, brass plate, sewer stone, coal slag, patina copper and dark timber. Cobbles, soot brick, coal slag and sewer stone also have 45° and 22.5° slopes.
• Platform kit: one-way iron catwalks, riveted girders, wooden scaffolds, wrought-iron balconies, stone ledges, chain-hung platforms and pipe walkways, with posts, poles, corbels and braces.
• Building kit: brick, stone and timber walls, cornices and trim, shop windows, doors, dormers, slate and copper roofs, interior walls and floors, fireplaces, pipes and valves, ladders, gear blocks, conveyors, crushers, sewer mouths, a clock dial and bunting swags. Many are ready-made multi-tile pieces.
• Liquids and falls: canal water with banks, sewer sludge, molten metal, boiling oil and molten-metal falls.
• 865 props:
  • streets and market (96): gas lamps, pillar boxes, benches, a grand gear fountain, an inventor statue, market stalls, barrows, newspaper stands, hanging shop signs, awnings and a steam velocipede
  • buildings and facades (125): a domed market hall, a bank, townhouses, shopfronts, a clock gatehouse, a tram depot and a factory front, plus wall signs, plaques, lamps and windows
  • gear factory and foundry (97): boilers, steam hammers, stamp presses, furnaces, crucibles, ladles, chain hoists, coal carts on rails, slag pots, valve banks, punch clocks and tool boards
  • inventor's workshop and lab (89): workbenches, lathes, an orrery, a Wimshurst machine, tesla coils, specimen jars, blueprints, goggles, barometers and a model airship
  • parlour, kitchen and shops (94): armchairs, grandfather clocks, gramophones, bookcases, a cast-iron range, copper pans, tea sets, and curio, clock and toy shop counters and displays
  • chimney rooftops (88): chimney stacks and pots, water towers, skylights, weathervanes, washing lines, pigeon lofts, antennae and a rooftop windmill
  • airship dock (92): mooring masts, gangways, cargo cranes, nets, ballast bags, crates, propellers, aether canisters, windsocks and signal flags
  • sewers and canal (92): valve manifolds, outflow pipes, grates, glowing mushrooms, lost treasures, lock gates, sluices, a narrowboat, bollards and towpath clutter
  • the great clocktower (92): giant gear trains, escapements, the pendulum, bells, the clock face from behind, automata and a winding room
• 222 animated props, 4 to 16 frames each, all seamless loops. They include:
  • gas lamps, wall lamps, furnaces, forges, fireplaces, braziers and lit windows
  • turning gears and gear trains, a swinging pendulum, bells, clock hands, pistons, steam hammers, conveyors and an automata parade
  • tesla coils, arcing wires and glowing aether tech
  • steam vents, chimney smoke, sparks, drips and pickups (cogs, coins, keys, pocket watches, aether shards)
  • city life: a bobbing moored airship, a hoisting crane, flags, weathervanes, laundry, a narrowboat and rowboat, lock gates and the gear fountain
• 56 characters in 32x32 frames (bigger bosses and beasts use larger frames), 218 animations in all:
  • 2 heroes, a tinkerer and an aeronaut, with idle, walk, run, jump, fall, land, attack, throw and more
  • 20 townsfolk with idle, walk and a work action: a lamplighter, a chimney sweep, a newsboy, a flower seller, a clockmaker, a factory worker, an engineer, an aristocrat, a gentleman, a constable, an airship captain, an organ grinder, a pie seller, a tinker kid, a professor, a maid, a mechanic, a postman, an elder inventor and a dockworker
  • 16 enemies with attacks, hurt and death: an automaton guard, a steam golem, a clockwork spider, a tesla sentry, a steam drone, a clockwork knight, a gearbox gremlin, a smog wraith, a rust crawler, a sewer gator, a sludge slime, a brass hound, a pneumatic brute, an aether wisp, a mech walker and a clockwork crow
  • 18 critters and helpers: a street cat, a mechanical dog, pigeons, a raven, a canary, a messenger bird, a clockwork owl, a sewer rat, a brass beetle, a snail, a moth, a frog, a bat, a canal duck, a toy soldier, a helper bot, a tea automaton and a steam mule
• 7 parallax backgrounds (30 layers, 512x288, tile horizontally): city skyline, factory district, rooftops, airship harbour, canal, underground and clockwork interior. The smog palette adds a haze layer.
• 4 palettes: day, sunset, night and smog. Every tile, prop, animation, character and background is re-graded, and gas lamps, furnaces, molten metal, tesla arcs and aether glow stay bright.
• 9 example maps as Tiled .tmx files (the scenes on this page).
• Light pools: gaslight, furnace, tesla and aether glow overlays at 32, 64 and 128 px.
• Formats:
  • sprite sheets at 1x, 2x and 3x, and every asset as its own PNG
  • animation strips, single frames and GIF previews
  • character sheets with one row per animation, plus a layout file
  • props_sheet.json with atlas coordinates
  • Tiled .tsx tilesets with terrains, collision flags and animations set up

The mock game screen's UI is only for show and is not included.

All four palettes use the same file names and atlas layout, so switching the time of day or the smog in your engine or in Tiled is a single image swap.

Grid: 16x16 px. Characters use 32x32 frames (the automaton guard, clockwork knight, smog wraith, steam golem, mech walker and other big ones use larger frames) and face right, so flip them for left. The bottom edge of each prop PNG is the floor it stands on. For hanging props (signs, lamps, hoists, nets, pendulums), the top edge is the beam. Light comes from the upper left.

Godot 4:

1. Drop the folder into your project.
2. Set Project Settings → Rendering → Textures → Canvas Textures → Default Texture Filter to Nearest.
3. Make a TileSet from tiles/tileset.png with a 16x16 region size. Use Terrains (Match Corners and Sides) for the 10 blob sets, add physics layers to the solid tiles and turn on One Way Collision for the platform tiles.
4. For characters and animated props, use an AnimatedSprite2D with the strips in animations/strips/ or the rows of *_sheet.png. frames.txt and characters/layout.txt list the speeds.
5. For the backgrounds, put each layer in a Parallax2D using the scroll factors in layers.txt.

Unity:

1. Import the PNGs with Texture Type Sprite (2D and UI), Filter Mode Point (no filter), Compression None and Pixels Per Unit 16.
2. Slice tileset.png in the Sprite Editor (Grid By Cell Size, 16x16) and paint with a Tile Palette. Rule Tiles work well for the blob terrains; use a Platform Effector 2D for one-way platforms.
3. Slice a character sheet by its frame size (see layout.txt) and drag a row of frames into the scene to create an animation clip.
4. For parallax, move each background layer by the camera position times its factor in layers.txt.

GameMaker:

1. Create a Tile Set from tileset.png (16x16) and use Auto Tiles for the terrains.
2. Import each animation strip as a sprite with Import Strip Image and set the frame count shown in frames.txt.
3. Put each background layer on its own Background layer with Horizontal Tile on, and scroll it by its factor in layers.txt.
4. Turn off Interpolate Colours Between Pixels in Game Options.

Tiled: open any map in maps/. Tilesets are in <palette>/tiled/. Use the terrain brushes to paint cobbles, brick, stone, riveted iron, brass plate, sewer stone, slag, copper and timber. Water, sludge, molten metal, conveyors and lit windows animate in Tiled's preview.

The pack also works in LDtk, Defold, Construct and any engine that reads PNGs.

You can use these assets in personal and commercial games and projects, and edit or recolour them however you like. Credit to bubbabba is appreciated but not required.

You can't resell or redistribute the assets themselves, edited or not, including as part of another asset pack, tileset or template.

Want to try it first? The free demo has the day tileset, 21 props, 5 animations and the tinkerer hero, under the same license.

Files:

• clockwork_city_v1.0.zip: the full tileset, props and parallax backgrounds in the day palette, with the Tiled files, light pools and example maps
• clockwork_city_animations_v1.0.zip: every animated prop in the day palette (strips at 1x, 2x and 3x, and single frames)
• clockwork_city_animation_gifs_v1.0.zip: GIF previews of every animation
• clockwork_city_characters_v1.0.zip: all 56 characters (sheets, strips and GIFs)
• clockwork_city_palette_<sunset|night|smog>_v1.0.zip and ..._animations_v1.0.zip: the sunset, night and smog sets (grab only the ones you need)
• clockwork_city_free_demo.zip: the free sample

Every file is under 10 MB. Unzip them into the same folder and they merge into one clockwork_city/ folder.

Bundle deal: get this pack and the other 13 16x16 side-scroller packs for $19.99 in the Complete Side-Scroller Pixel Art Collection.