Fathom - Underwater Pixel Art Asset Pack

Fathom is a complete underwater kit for 2D games. Fish, crustaceans, coral, wreckage, tilesets, parallax backgrounds, particles and interface icons, all drawn on one 53 colour palette and lit from above by the same rule, so anything you drop next to anything else looks like it belongs there.

Everything is side on, which suits platformers, aquarium and fishing games, diving games and side scrolling adventures.

How it was made

The artwork is generated by a custom Python tool we wrote with AI assistance: shape geometry, a fixed 53 colour palette and one top lit shading rule applied across the whole set. That shared rule is why a crab and a shipwreck look like they came from the same hand. No image generation model was used.

What you get

• 33 creatures, every one animated. Clownfish, blue tang, butterflyfish, angelfish, pufferfish (and a puffed version), lionfish, barracuda, shark, anglerfish with a glowing lure, koi, schooling fry, two jellyfish, octopus, squid, two crabs, lobster, shrimp, two starfish, sea urchin, sea turtle, manta ray, moray eel, seahorse, nautilus, sea snail, open and closed clam, and two anemones. 230 animation frames across the creatures alone, four to eight frames each.
• 35 props. Treasure chests open and closed, anchor, barrel, amphorae, two wreck sections, message bottle, four shells, six corals, sea grass, rocks, a rock arch, skull, diving helmet, mine, crate, signpost, pearl, coin pile and an animated hydrothermal vent.
• 65 tiles across 8 sheets. Three 16 tile autotile sets (sand, rock, coral crusted rock), animated water surface, four water depth tiles, a caustics overlay, platform pieces and kelp.
• 4 parallax backgrounds. 256x144, tiling horizontally with no seam: depth gradient, far reef, mid rocks and near kelp.
• 12 effects. Three bubble sizes, bubble pop, rising bubble stream, ink cloud, sand puff, splash, sparkle and three light shafts.
• 20 interface icons, three of them oxygen bar states, plus hearts, stars, arrows and a gauge.

169 objects in all, 149 transparent PNGs.

Open viewer.html first

The pack ships with a one file catalogue. Double click it and every animation plays, every sprite sheet is drawn with its cell boundaries marked and labelled, and the palette copies to your clipboard one colour at a time. No server, no internet, nothing to install. It is the fastest way to see what you have before you wire anything up.

Built to actually drop in

• PNG only. No app specific formats, nothing to convert.
• Every creature ships twice: a single still frame, and a horizontal animation strip with equal sized cells.
• manifest.json lists every asset with its size, frame width, frame count and motion type, so you can wire the pack up without measuring anything by hand.
• Packed atlases with JSON coordinates for creatures, props and icons, if you would rather batch them.
• The palette is included as PNG, GPL and HEX, so anything you draw yourself will match. Loads straight into Aseprite, GIMP, Krita and Lospec.
• Autotile sheets are a plain 4x4 grid read left to right, with the cell names and coordinates in the manifest. Inner corner tiles are included, so concave joins work properly.
• 16x16 tiles. Scale by whole numbers with nearest neighbour filtering. The README gives the exact setting for Unity, Godot and Unreal.
• Every creature faces right and nothing has baked in shadows, so flipping horizontally just works.
• The download is small on purpose. Every sprite is drawn at the size it ships at rather than rendered large and scaled down, so all 149 PNGs together come to well under a megabyte.

Try it first

The free sampler on this page has four animated creatures, the complete sand autotile set, a few props and icons, the full palette and the same viewer. Drop it in your engine and see how it sits before you decide.

Licence

Use it in as many projects as you like, free or commercial, with no revenue limit and no extra fee. Change it however you want. Credit is appreciated but not required. You may not resell or redistribute the assets as assets, mint them as tokens, or use them as training data. Full terms are in LICENSE.txt.

If you make something with this we would genuinely like to see it.