This is the one hundred ninety-fourth entry in the Scratching That Itch series, wherein I randomly select and write about one of the 1741 games and game-related things included in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. The Bundle raised $8,149,829.66 split evenly between the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and Community Bail Fund, but don’t worry if you missed it. There are plenty of ways you can help support the vital cause of racial justice; try here for a start. Lastly, as always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

Our one hundred ninety-fourth random selection from the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality has gone on a construction spree all around us. It’s Heroic Asset Series: Buildings Pack, by Aleksandr Makarov, and its tagline in the bundle reads:

Tiny animated buildings pack with 64 colors!

The only things better than tiny buildings are animated tiny buildings.

What are the odds? Just four picks ago, I wrote about Heroic Asset Series: Icon Pack, and noted that four of the 21 entries in the Heroic Asset Series are available in the bundle. Now, we’ve already stumbled upon another one! If only there were some way to calculate the odds of that happening… oh wait, there is. After randomly selecting the Icon Pack, there were 1551 things left in the bundle. The chance of this specific pack coming up in the next 4 random picks is 4/1551… and since there were three more Heroic Asset Series packs waiting to be found, the chance of getting one is actually three times that. Which gives us about a 0.77% chance. That’s the kind of hard-hitting math you can expect from Waltorious Writes About Games.

Like the Icon Pack, the Buildings Pack is an asset pack, meaning it’s not a game itself but rather a set of art files that can be used to make one’s own games. Like everything else in the Heroic Asset Series, the Buildings Pack uses vibrant 64-color pixel art, so it will fit well with assets from the other packs. The artwork is in .png format, and is organized by category, including “Towns”, “Mines”, and the more mysterious “AttributeModifier”, among others (some with sub-categories as well). There are also some preview images with labels that give a convenient overview of the buildings included in the pack, to help find the desired source files more easily. Despite the tagline, not all of the buildings are animated, but those that are have subfolders containing the relevant animation frames. All told, there are 129 designs included with 268 total sprites, ranging from 16×16 up to 64×64 pixels.

As a special bonus, there’s also a smaller “Overworld Starter Pack” included, with some sprite sheets for various landscape features, so people can build their own maps to add the buildings to. For this post, I’ve just grabbed the screenshots from the itch.io page (to avoid inadvertently sharing any assets directly from the pack) which showcase both the buildings and the overworld tiles. The top image, as you may have noticed, is actually an animated gif showing off the animated buildings.

That’s pretty much it. The focus on buildings makes the Buildings Pack less broadly applicable than the Icon Pack, but if you need some cool buildings to populate a pixel art map in a game you’re making, this may fit the bill nicely. If you missed it in the bundle, Heroic Asset Series: Buildings Pack is sold for a minimum price of $8, but at the time of writing, Aleksandr Makarov is unable to receive money from purchases due to sanctions in response to Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Scroll to the bottom of the itch.io page for more info on that and some alternate means of support.

That’s 194 down, and only 1547 to go!