Free Game Resources

Links to free stuff (Creative Commons-licensed and the like) that can be used in game creation.

Game Design/Ideas

• Lost Garden - Directory of Posts
• Three Hundred Mechanics. Lot of game ideas, free to use

Graphics/Art

• FreeGameDev wiki: 2D, 3D and audio resources (it also has a search section)
• OpenGameArt
• Openclipart
• Genetica Texture Packs High quality tiling textures.
• WayOfThePixel forum post with lots of links to utilities, pixel-art tutorials, resources, etc.
• http://reinerstileset.4players.de/englisch.html isometric sprites
• http://www.spiralgraphics.biz/packs/
• http://www.spriters-resource.com/
• Sprite Database (Careful! Most of the stuff there is copyrighted)
• http://www.burningwell.org/

Software:

• Freegamedev's list of 2D and 3D software.
• graphicsgale
• Pixothello
• ASEPrite
• Texturepacker (has free & paid versions)

Procedural generation:

• A Bitwise Method For Applying Tilemaps is an interesting technique related with tilemaps and graphics.
• Tile/Map-Based Game Techniques: Handling Terrain Transitions shows a more elaborate technique for handling transitions between tiles.

Misc:

• CG graphics tutorials. Written for C++ but the concepts are generic, of course.

Sound

• bfxr is an online sound generator.
• Independent Ljudbank (Swedish)
• Freesound (Requires registration for downloads, but otherwise bullshit-free)
• PDSounds (might be down, check out this in that case)
• Soundsnap (make sure you learn the license, it is not exactly CC)
• Media College's sound effects
• Newground's audio contains free songs and loops.
• http://www.artistx.org/site2/media/free-resources/free-music.html another listing-type page. Licenses vary.

Music:

• Jamendo's free music (Various)
• Musopen
• Binärpilot (Evil chiptunes. Big plus for umlaut. Licensed CC-NC-ND. Use with caution.)
• 8bitcollective (Chiptunes) (Licensed CC-NC-SA. Use with caution.)
• Fanatical Productions
• Creative Commons' own list of music, containing lots of links. Two examples below:
  • ccmixter is a "a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want."
  • sampleswap is a "100% free AIFF/WAV collection contains 6.4 GB of sounds"
• abundant-music procedural music generator.
• Modarchive Tracker music (MOD, XM, S3M, IT ...)

Software:

• Freegamedev's list of audio software
• sfxr (Sound effect generator)
  • Flash version of the same software (google project page)
  • Cocoa version for mac.
• Musagi Is a music editor, Windows only.
• pxtone Comes with a composition program (ptCollage), instrument editor (ptVoice), and a sound editor (ptNoise). For an English user interface delete japanese.ico in the root directory :D

Fonts

• Google Web Fonts 320 font families (+ variants) which can be freely used for whatever you want (license)
• OpenFontLibrary (this helps you browse it)
• dafont
• acidfonts has both free and non-free fonts.
• 40+ Excellent Free Fonts A collection of selected fonts

Physics / Movement

• Collision Detection for Dummies
• Sonic the Hedgehog's physics guide is a group of pages explaining in detail how physics are modeled in Sonic the Hedgehog.
• N tutorial A and N tutorial B explain how they did the physics in N: the way of the Ninja.
• Movement mechanics on "The Legend of Zelda"
• Iron Coding's Excellent tutorial for tile-based movement (It's flash, but very well explained. The ideas can be used for any language)
• The guide to implementing 2D-platformers A good read about 2d platformers: main types, general implementations, and some gritty details
• Hardcoding & Slopes An elegant method to implement slopes and rounded tiles in an orthogonal game.

Editors

• Physics Body Editor (previously known as box2d-editor) Visual application to easily create collision complex polygons for in-game collision test.

Maps

Software

• Tiled map editor A generic map editor.
• Ogmo Editor A generic level editor, saving to XML files.
• DAME Editor Another generic level editor, done in flixel. You can create your own map exporter in Lua.

Procedural generation

• Dynamic Tile Blending Technique
• Procedural Content Generation wiki
• Think Labyrinth! Software, algorithms and history for making mazes.
• Unangbard Dungeon generation
• Jamis Buck's rubyconf2011 presentation about maze generation algorithms
• Maze generation algorithm recap Descriptions, demos and implementations of various maze-generating algorithms.

General

• The Ultimate Indie Game Resource List