Game asset glossary: sprites, tiles, UI and audio
The terms you meet when you buy or make 2D game art and sound: sprite sheets and atlases, tilesets and autotiling, 9-slice UI, filtering for pixel art, seamless textures and loops, and audio levels. Engine-specific points link the Godot, Unity or MDN documentation; audio standards link the ITU.
- Sprite sheetOne image that holds many frames of a 2D character or effect, laid out in a grid or packed, plus data saying where each frame is.
- Texture atlasA single large texture packing many unrelated images (icons, UI pieces, props) so the game can draw them without switching textures.
- TilesetA collection of equal-sized tiles (commonly 16×16 or 32×32 pixels) used to paint game levels on a grid called a tilemap.
- Autotile (terrain set, 47-tile blob)Tiles drawn for every way a terrain can meet its neighbours, so the editor can pick the right edge or corner automatically while you paint.
- 9-slice (nine-patch)A way to stretch a UI panel or button to any size by cutting it into 9 parts: the corners never scale, the edges stretch in one direction and the centre fills the rest.
- Nearest-neighbour filtering (pixel-perfect)Texture sampling that takes the closest pixel instead of blending neighbours, which keeps pixel art sharp when it is scaled up.
- MipmapsPre-shrunk copies of a texture (each half the size of the last) that the GPU uses when the texture is drawn small or far away, to avoid shimmering.
- Seamless (tileable) textureA texture whose left edge continues into its right edge and top into bottom, so it can repeat across a surface with no visible seam.
- Seamless audio loopMusic or ambience cut so the end flows straight back into the start with no click, gap or jump in rhythm.
- Sound effect levels (peak and loudness)How loud sound files are, measured either by their highest sample (peak, in dBFS) or by perceived loudness over time (LUFS / LKFS, defined by ITU-R BS.1770).