---
title: "Procedural placeholder art"
package: "@phaser-ae/art-2d"
tier: Free
version: 3.0.0-2
released: 2026-10-14
updated: 2026-10-19
description: "A hundred and five generators that draw tiles, character sheets, items, vehicles, scenery and gems into canvases, so a game has a full tileset and cast with no art files."
url: https://phaser.io/packs/art-2d
site: Phaser - https://phaser.io
---

# Procedural placeholder art

A hundred and five ready-made generators that each draw a picture into a canvas: tiles, characters, items, vehicles,
scenery, fruit, gems, space objects and more. A prototype gets a tileset and a cast without one art file, and
swapping in real art later changes the frame a sprite points at and nothing else.

## What it does

Every generator is a function that takes an options bag and returns an `OffscreenCanvas`. You hand that canvas to
`game.assets.addStrip`, which registers it as frames, and from then on a sprite, an animation or a tilemap uses those
frames exactly as it would use frames from an image file. Nothing is loaded and nothing is requested, so a game runs
before anyone has drawn a thing.

Tiles repeat without a visible join (all but the plank), and `tileset` packs a list of them into one strip for a
tilemap, so a level made of grass, stone and water is three calls and a pack. Four generators return animation
strips: a four-frame walker, a six-frame person with idle, run and jump frames, a spinning coin and a flickering torch,
ready to drop into a sprite's animations. The rest are single sprites at whatever square size you ask for.

Every generator takes its colours as options, and the ones with a random element take a seed, so the same call
always draws the same picture. That makes a recoloured enemy per wave or a different stone tile per level a change of
arguments. Randomness comes from the kernel's seeded stream, so a seed draws the same picture on every machine. The
pack touches no page and needs no backend, so it works in a worker or a build step as well as in a game.

## Features

- **Twenty-one repeating tiles** — checker, brick, grass, stone, dirt, water, sand, metal, plank, crate, lava, ice,
  snow, wood, cobble, gravel, hedge, road, circuit, mud and marble.
- **Four animation strips** — `characterSheet` (a four-frame walker), `personSheet` (idle, a four-frame run and a
  jump), `coinSheet` (a spinning coin) and `torchSheet` (a swaying flame).
- **Seventy-seven sprites** — pickups, characters, creatures, vehicles, eleven fruit, gems and treasure, fantasy
  props, planets and satellites, shoot-'em-up enemies, street furniture, trees, plants and clouds.
- **Three texture maps** — `envMap`, a reflection of sky, horizon and ground, and `noiseNormalMap` and
  `brickNormalMap`, bump normals that line up with the brick tile.
- **Colours as options** — a body, highlight and shadow colour for sprites, and a base, detail and accent for tiles,
  each with its own default palette.
- **Seeds where it matters** — the generators with a random element, such as grass, lava or an asteroid's outline,
  take a seed; the rest draw the same picture every time.
- **Tilesets in one call** — `tileset` packs tiles into a strip whose frames a tilemap reads in order.
- **Safe canvas sizes** — every canvas side is clamped between 1 and 4096 pixels with `clampCanvasDim`, rather than
  throwing.

## Good for

- **Prototypes and game jams**, where the rules need testing long before the art is ready.
- **Platformers**, with grass, stone and plank tiles, a running and jumping hero, coins and torches.
- **Top-down and maze games**, with hedge, road, cobble and dirt tiles and a cast of slimes, ghosts and wizards.
- **Space and invader shooters**, with ships, interceptors, bombers, invaders, mines, planets and asteroids.
- **Puzzle and collecting games**, with fruit, gems and treasure in recolourable sets.
- **Tests and demos**, which need recognisable pictures without shipping image files.

## Make it yours

Each generator's options set its `size` in pixels, its colours and, where it has one, its `seed`. Sprites take a
`color` for the body, an `accent` for the highlight and a `detail` for the shadow or outline; tiles take a `base`,
`detail` and `accent`; the walker takes `body`, `outline` and `leg`. The maps take sky, horizon, ground and sun
colours, or a bump scale and strength.

Two different looks from the same generators: draw small, at 16 pixels, and show the sprites three times larger with
the screen's pixel-art setting on for a chunky retro look; or draw at the size you show them, say 64 pixels, for
crisp shapes. Recolour a slime blue for one wave and red for the next, or give each level its own seeded stone and
grass so no two floors look quite the same.

## A quick look

Three tiles packed into a tilemap, and a running hero from the person sheet:

```ts
import { grassTile, stoneTile, waterTile, personSheet, tileset } from '@phaser-ae/art-2d';
const strip = tileset([grassTile({ size: 16 }), stoneTile({ size: 16, seed: 4 }), waterTile({ size: 16 })]);
const first = game.assets.addStrip('tiles', strip, 16, 16);
game.tiles.map({ tile: 16, layers: [{ layer: 'world', data: LEVEL, firstFrame: first }] });
const hero = game.assets.addStrip('hero', personSheet({ size: 16 }), 16, 16);   // six frames
```

## Works with

- `particle-textures` — soft, star and spark pictures for particles.
- `vector-art` — line art on the vector layer instead of raster sprites.
- `procgen` — tileable noise textures for terrain and clouds.
- `ui-texture-wood`, `ui-texture-paper` and `ui-texture-stone` — textured panels for the interface.

## Good to know

- It is placeholder art and looks it: clear at small sizes, never finished. Shapes, poses and frame counts are fixed;
  for a picture of your own, draw it with the kernel's `game.paint`, or pixel art from rows of characters with
  `game.pixels`.
- Frames are always square, and `tileset` sizes every cell by the first tile, so give all the tiles one size.
- A whole strip is clamped to 4096 pixels too, so the frames of a very large sheet past that width are cut off.
- No material in the engine uses the environment or normal maps yet; they are correct maps for your own renderer.
- A plain Node script has no `OffscreenCanvas`, so a generator called there throws.

---

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