Following the advice of several tutorials, and taking a fair amount of time to practice on my own, I have constructed a template for making planets to use in any 2d space game. The template is based in GIMP.

The template itself allows for subtle tweaking via layers of atmopheric lighting at the periphery and on the body of the planet. It allows for variable cloud cover and strength, variable landmass color and shading, slight overlay of infrastructure lighting for night scenes. It has a shadow overlay that at default makes crescent shadows over the surface. This can be lessened or turned off entirely.

I am including with this several planets I have made myself with it, as well as an image sheet i constructed using all but two of the planets I am including. There are 14 pre-generated planets in the package along with the imagesheet and the template. Due to the considerable time it took me to create and perfect this set, I am releasing it under CC-BY 3.0. All I ask is a simple attribution and link back to this page as listed in the attribution notice.