Free Japanese Ninja / Shinobi sprite sheet

This is the third in a series of free sprite sheets we're putting up here for any use, under a Creative Commons attribution license. It continues the warrior / fighter theme - this time with an eastern twist. For previous sprite sheets see:

• 35 free fantasy creature designs and sprite sheets
• Free modern soldier / war fighter sprite sheet

So, below you'll see links for the sprite sheets (in large 256px and small 128px versions), as well as the original layered PSD art for a Ninja / Shinobi spritesheet. A Ninja was a Japanese mercenary who specialized in unorthodox forms of war. Unlike the Samurai, the Ninja operated covertly.

The Ninja was trained in espionage, sabotage, assassination and various countermeasures. The sprite sheet we're giving away here includes animations for Tai sabaki (silent walking), an armed attack / strike with a ninjato (a type of katana) and a shuriken throw.

The various resources for the Ninja sprite sheet are:

• The original layered Ninja Sprite artwork PSD
• The large Ninja sprite sheet (256px) PNG
• Reference XML plist coordinates for the large Ninja sprite sheet (256px)
• The small Ninja sprite sheet (128px) PNG
• Reference XML plist coordinates for the small Ninja sprite sheet (128px)

Feel free to mix up the frame order as you see fit, but the best-fit sequences for walking and striking are as follows:

• walking: w1, w2, w3, w2, w1, stood, w4, w5, w6, w5, w4
• striking: s1>s8, s4, s3, s2, s1, stood

All the files above are free to use for whatever purpose, licensed as per the terms of the Creative Commons attribution license.

For those interested in the technical side of this, check out the modern soldier post for information on how we generated the sprite sheet and index in Zwoptex, as well as pointers to further resources on using these in Cocos2d.

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