Free modern soldier / war fighter sprite and sprite sheet for use in platformer or side scroller

Having released some unused / available fantasy sprites recently, we decided to continue in that vein and look at sharing the output of our art and production development in other ways.

The art here was for no specific project, just an output of us wanting to try out a few art and animation methods - as well as an excellent excuse to try out Zwoptex for the first time.

It's themed around a Modern Warfare / Warfighter / Splinter Cell style contemporary soldier, armed with a pair of USP .45-style pistols, kevlar and flak jacket and balaclava.

So, free for any use (under Creative Commons Attribution) here are a couple of sprite sheets (one large, one small) with running, jumping and shooting animations for a generic soldier charater.

The various useful bits:

• The original layered Modern Soldier Photoshop PSD
• The large Modern Soldier (256px sprite) sprite sheet
• Reference XML plist co-ordinates for the large sprite sheet
• The small Modern Soldier (128px sprite) sprite sheet
• Reference XML plist co-ordinates for the small sprite sheet

The spritesheets were produced with the wonderful Zwoptex - if you need different resolutions or alterations, export from PhotoShop using the File > Scripts > Export Layers To Files option.


If you're interested in more of the development and art side of these, check out / follow our lead artist on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/goosemouse.

Frames in the spritesheet are referenced and tagged as per the layers in the PSD - all frames can be flipped, default direction is facing frame right - see below for note on turning.

Reversed animations are shown with frame order reversed.

• standing - default stance
• prepshoot1-3 - moving from standing to shooting position (run once)
• prepshoot3-1 - return to standing from shooting
• shooting1-7 - shooting itself, can be looped
• running1-10 - running, can be looped
• jump1-6 - jumping up in the air
• jump7 - hold position for top of jump
• jump6-1 - descending from jump

Turning (to face frame left) has dedicated frames (turn1-3) that be should be run as:

• turn1
• turn2
• turn3
• turn3 (flipped)
• turn2 (flipped)
• turn1 (flipped)
• standing (flipped)

Ray Wenderlich has an excellent post on using sprite sheets in Cocos2d - the co-ordinate plists above, combined with the .png spritesheets will get a significant way to having a fully animated soldier running in an iOS / Cocos2d game.

We're interested in feedback on how useful this stuff is to the community - while we've got some (development and technical) objectives of our own in producing these shared assets, it'd be useful to know what people are looking for and/or struggling to find.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.