This campaign should interest anyone who wants to make great-looking isometric maps (whether for their tabletop pen-and-paper RPG campaigns, or just as a fun creative outlet) and would like to use existing isometric assets (made by industry pros) to do so.

Did you know that there is a vast treasure trove of high-quality isometric mapping content freely available online, in the form of PNG assets from popular video/computer games? There are assets covering a wide variety of genres: modern day, near future, sci-fi, medieval, fantasy, cyberpunk, and more.

Anyone with a LOT of time and patience can freely download these assets (they are not behind a paywall), and utilize them to make their own custom isometric maps, using their image editor of choice (Photoshop, GIMP, MapForge, Tiled, etc.).

The problem is that acquiring the assets is incredibly time-consuming and labor-intensive, since it involves manually loading and then downloading each individual asset (which requires manually editing each and every URL to get the full-resolution assets and avoid getting the asset in ".webp" format), and there are tens of thousands of assets.

Downloading all these assets was a gargantuan task, and it took a loooong time, but since I started gathering the assets during the long months of the COVID lockdowns, I had a lot of time on my hands. I now have an amazing library of isometric assets at my disposal.

However, I can't legally (or morally) redistribute the asset collections. Quite simply, because it's not my art. So instead I am creating a small app that will automate all the asset downloading and store the assets on your hard drive. It will do the boring grunt work for you, saving each backer potentially hundreds of hours of this painstakingly monotonous task.

This $7 app, which currently has the working title "Bulk Downloader", will be able to load Game Asset Collection files, which contain the download links (ie, URLs) for every asset in a Collection.  It will then proceed to iterate through this list of URLs, downloading each asset in turn, until all the assets in the Collection have been downloaded. A progress bar shows how far along it is in this task.

The app will work on Windows and on Macs. Linux users should be able to run the software using WINE or Virtual Box (at least that's been the case with all the other software I've developed over the years).

Via this BackerKit campaign, I am offering five Game Asset Collection files (these are essentially databases of URLs pointing to image files) that will allow you to easily and quickly download the assets from the following isometric games, using the software that will be provided to all backers:

As a general rule, pricing was determined as follows: $1 for every 350 assets, plus $1 if the collection is sorted (the artwork is organized into folders, for your convenience; this makes finding particular assets much easier and faster when you're making your maps).

 

Please watch the following videos (preferably in fullscreen mode, which is only possible when viewing on the YouTube site) in order to preview the assets contained in each collection. Because there are so many assets to preview, they go by pretty fast, but feel free to pause the videos anytime to get a better look at particular assets that interest you. Note that some assets will appear pixellated because they've been "upsized" to match the thumbnail size (don't worry, these assets look fine at actual size). Other assets are actually much higher resolution than what the videos show, since I can only show smallish thumbnails due to time constraints.

Note that this first video covers two collections, Imperion and Settlers Online.

The various collections are available as Add-Ons to your pledge amount. Simply add the collection/s that you would like to the $7 "A-La-Carte" base pledge. This will automatically increase the amount of your pledge by the cost of the Add-On/s you desire. If you would like all the assets from all the games (totaling well over 27000 assets), pledge for the "I Want Everything!" pledge level to receive a discount.

Many of you may already have a preferred image editor, such as Photoshop or Gimp, for creating your maps. For those who find such programs to have too high of a learning curve, I suggest that you consider trying out my own MapForge map-making software, which is specifically tailored for map-making, provides a significantly lower learning curve, and offers support for isometric map-making with powerful and time-saving features. A slightly discounted MapForge license is available as an Add-On to your pledge, for those who would like one (but note that these are limited in quantity).

MapForge is map-making software that was successfully funded on Kickstarter in 2017. The program now boasts over 250 (!!!) content Add-Ons available for it from leading mapping-content providers. Fifty-nine of these Add-Ons are specifically for isometric map-making.

For those new to MapForge, please visit the above links for more information about the software (it's simply too much information to repeat here). The FAQ for the original KS campaign is also a useful source of information.

I'll be posting videos in this campaign's Updates to show examples of the sorts of maps you can make with the assets being offered, and will be using MapForge for this.

All rewards for this project are digital downloads, so shipping is neither a factor nor an added expense. Battlegrounds Games has over 20 years of experience developing and distributing software and other digital content. I will be using Google Drive to host/distribute the rewards, which provides a very robust and speedy delivery method with no bandwidth limits. All but one of my many prior crowdfunding campaigns have delivered on time, and in many cases earlier than expected.

I've already made a test app to be absolutely sure that what I wanted to achieve was technically possible with my particular toolset. There were some hurdles to overcome when I realized that the test app wasn't able to connect to secure servers ("https://") once it was compiled, but a couple of quick refactors later, and now it works wonderfully. I made sure to test it on both Mac and Windows.

I have also confirmed that I'll be able to deliver an app that works on Macs that are running macOS Catalina or higher (which can't normally run 32-bit apps).  It will even run on M1 through M4-equipped Macs.

Just as a reminder, this is a fixed funding (i.e., an all-or-nothing) campaign. If the funding goal isn't reached by the deadline, I get nothing, and you backers get nothing (except a full reimbursement of the amount you pledged).