---
title: "Retro shooter textures"
package: "@phaser-ae/retro-textures"
tier: Pro
version: 3.0.0-0
released: 2026-10-24
updated: 2026-10-24
description: "Generates tiling pixel-art textures for walls, floors and ceilings in the look of 1990s first-person shooters, each with a height map, a glow mask and an optional normal map."
url: https://phaser.io/packs/retro-textures
site: Phaser - https://phaser.io
---

# Retro shooter textures

Walls, floors, ceilings, doors and liquids in the chunky pixel-art look of the early-1990s first-person shooters, made
from a short spec instead of a texture pack. Each one tiles, comes with a height map and a glow mask, and is the same
every time you ask for it.

## What it does

You ask for a kind of surface, such as `panel`, `door`, `brick`, `light` or `lava`, and `retroTexture` returns its
pixels. It paints them the way artists of the period did: every material uses one ramp of eight shades from
near-black to a highlight, flat areas carry a scattered one-shade grain so they never look flat, raised shapes get a
bright one-pixel edge on the top and left and a dark one on the bottom and right, and panels have cut corners and
rivets. Bricks and stones have rough, chipped edges in darker mortar and the odd crack. Because everything that
crosses an edge wraps round, every texture tiles on both axes.

Every texture also carries a height map, with seams and mortar low and rivet heads highest, and an emissive mask that
is lit only on lamps, screens, lit buttons, slime and lava. `normalMap` turns the heights into a tangent-space normal
map, so a lit 3D renderer can bump the surface and make its lights glow while a flat raycaster just uses the colours.

Slime, ooze, lava and water are animated: a strip of frames that loops cleanly, with blobs that swirl and catch the
light, cracks of white-hot lava between drifting crust, and bright caustic lines on water. Generation is pure and
seeded, with no clock and no unseeded randomness, so the same spec gives the same bytes on every machine and a game
can rebuild its textures rather than ship them.

## Features

- **32 kinds of surface** — panels, tech walls, supports, doors, door trim, lights, crates, consoles, switches, vents,
  grates, pipes, girders, metal floor plate, hazard stripes, brick, stone, cobbles, concrete, tiles, marble, rock,
  wood, grass, window glass, fabric, plaster, server racks, slime, ooze, lava and water.
- **Offices as well as bases** — see-through glass (clear, frosted, wired, grimy, cracked, or a door with a push bar),
  carpets, runners and buttoned leather, painted walls with skirting and dado, suspended ceilings, and server racks
  whose lights blink.
- **Period pixel-art look** — eight-shade ramps, dithered grain, one-pixel bevels lit from the top left, chamfers,
  rivets, chipped edges and cracks.
- **28 built-in palettes** — steel, gunmetal, lab white, stone, brick, rust, hazard, toxic green, lava, water, brass,
  alien purple, glass, carpet, leather and more, chosen to sit together in one level; or pass any CSS colours, dark to light.
- **Variants and options** — four layouts for most kinds, and options for counts, sizes, seams, wear, rust, moss,
  states and styles, each documented with its range in `retroKinds`.
- **Tiling on both axes** — noise, mortar, stripes and shapes wrap at every edge, at any size from 16 to 256 pixels,
  square or not.
- **Height, glow and normal maps** — a height map and an emissive mask with every texture, and `normalMap` for lit
  renderers in either the OpenGL or DirectX convention.
- **Looping animation** — liquids come as a strip of frames that loops without a jump, drifting by whole tiles if you
  ask them to flow.
- **Themes for any surface name** — tech base, industrial, castle, neon arena, crypt and office recipes by name, and a resolver
  that guesses the rest from the words, so a level's `door-red` or `slime-pit` gets a fitting texture unasked.
- **Two states for switches** — the same switch on and off, with its lamps lit to match.
- **Headless and deterministic** — plain arrays out, no canvas needed; `paintRetroTexture` puts a frame on a canvas
  when there is one.

## Good for

- **A corridor or sector shooter** — tech bases, keyed doors, switches, nukage pools and lava without an art budget.
- **A dungeon crawler** — brick, mossy stone, cobbles, wood and torch-lit lamps from one palette set.
- **A retro mode for a 3D game** — the textures with their normal maps on real meshes keep the period look under
  modern lighting.
- **Game jams and prototypes** — a whole level of consistent textures in minutes, replaced with painted art later or
  never.
- **Top-down games** — grass, cobbles, floor plate, tiles and water tile just as well seen from above.
- **Tools and editors** — `retroKinds` lists every kind, variant and option, so a level editor can offer them as
  pickers.

## Make it yours

Every kind takes a seed, a size or a width and height, a palette and an accent ramp, a variant and its own options.
Bricks take courses, bricks per course, offset, mortar width and shade, roughness and cracks; panels take columns,
rows, chamfers, rivets and grime; doors take a straight or stepped seam, a split, recessed panels, ribs, windows and a
key-coloured stripe; lights take a grid, a shape and an on or off state. One wall might be a single riveted steel plate
at 64 pixels; another a 128 by 256 door split top and bottom with a blue key stripe; a third a pale old brick in a
custom ochre ramp with heavy cracks. Grates and girders can be see-through, and liquids take their blob size, swirl,
drift and number of bubbles.

## A quick look

Make a wall and a looping slime, then hand them to a raycast view or paint them into the atlas.

```ts
const wall = retroTexture({ kind: 'panel', size: 64, seed: 3, variant: 'quad' });
const slime = retroTexture({ kind: 'slime', frames: 8 });
view.texturePixels('wall', wall.width, wall.height, wall.rgba, wall.frames);
game.paint('slime', slime.width, slime.height, (ctx, f) => paintRetroTexture(ctx, slime, f), { frames: slime.frames });
const normals = normalMap(wall, { strength: 2 });
```

## Works with

- `raycast-view` — takes a texture's strip as it is, frames and all.
- `world-3d` — put the colours, normal map and glow mask on meshes for a lit retro scene.
- `cell-dungeon` and `sector-map` — the maps whose walls, floors and doors these textures dress.

## Good to know

- It makes surfaces, not sprites or characters; paint those with the engine's own painting calls.
- Textures are 16 to 256 pixels a side, in multiples of 8; below 32 the finest details shrink away.
- Generation takes a few milliseconds for a still texture at 64 pixels and much longer for large animated ones, so make
  textures at start or between levels, not every frame.
- The look is fixed to light from the top left; for other lighting use the normal map in a lit renderer.

---

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