Medieval Blocks — Isometric Village & Witch Quarter

An isometric village drawn at 9 pixels per metre, plus the witch quarter that grew next to it.

Eighteen buildings make an ordinary village: cottages, tavern, chapel, manor, water mill, barn, smithy, market hall. The other fourteen are its witch quarter — a witch's house under a pointed cap, an alchemist's tower, a mushroom house, a home inside a hollow tree, a wizard's shop, an astronomer's observatory, a herbalist with a glasshouse, a house grown through by an amethyst vein, a hut on chicken legs, a bog healer's stilt house, a snail house, a hermit's turf barrow, a rune forge and a house built on a bridge.

Everything comes from one palette and one light vector, so any two pieces put side by side keep the same tones and the same shadows. A witch's tower can stand next to a barn without a seam.

What is inside

• 32 buildings × 4 rotations × day / night / glow mask — 384 sprites
• the same 32 buildings standing on ground plots, aligned to the tile grid
• 20 ground modules: tracks, turns, crossroads, ford, cobbles, field, stream
• grass, meadow and yard ship in 8, 8 and 6 variants — lay them at random
• 21 street props in 4 rotations: carts, barrels, hay, fences, trees, market stalls
• palette as .gpl, .hex and a swatch image
• JSON manifests: sprite size, anchor and plot footprint for every rotation

The grid

Tile 64×32, one tile is 3.55 m. A road is one tile wide — a cart is 1.8 m across, and two of them pass on 3.55 m. Buildings occupy a whole number of tiles; the manifest gives the anchor in pixels, so placing a sprite means putting its anchor on the cell anchor.

All four rotations share one frame and one anchor: turning a building is a change of file, not a change of position. Axes: +X is east (right-down on screen), +Y is south (left-down). Ground modules follow the same rule — the letters in a name are the sides a track leaves by, and they travel with the picture when it turns.

Day, night and glow

Day and night are separate renders. At night the light comes from windows and fire rather than the sun, and no colour filter fakes that. The glow mask holds the emissive pixels only: add it over the day frame to build dusk, storm or any hour in between.

The witch quarter carries a second, cold glow — arcane green and amethyst beside the warm orange of hearths and torches. Both live in the same mask, so one additive pass lights the whole map.

Laying a map

Ground first, then shadows, then the clean building sprites in depth order. Do not tile the on_tiles/ blocks: they have their ground baked in, so a house drawn later puts its yard on the neighbour's roof. Grass, meadow and yard come in variants for a reason — one tile of grass repeated over a map reads as wallpaper, not as a field.

Made with code

Every sprite is rendered by a purpose-built renderer: bodies described in metres, one light vector, one palette. No diffusion models, no upscaled images. The renderer itself was written with the help of an LLM, which is why the AI disclosure on this page says yes.

Licence

Use in games, personal and commercial, with no cap on projects or copies sold. Modify, recolour and cut as your project needs. Do not resell the files themselves as an asset pack, and do not use them to train generative models. Credit is welcome, never required.