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

Graphics/Art

• FreeGameDev wiki: 2D, 3D and audio resources (it also has a search section)
• OpenGameArt
• Open ClipArt
• WayOfThePixel forum post with lots of links to utilities, pixel-art tutorials, resources, etc.
• http://reinerstileset.4players.de/englisch.html isometric sprites
• A Bitwise Method For Applying Tilemaps is an interesting technique related with tilemaps and graphics.

Software:

• Freegamedev's list of 2D and 3D software.

Sound

• 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:
  • ccmixer 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"

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.

Fonts

• OpenFontLibrary (this helps you browse it)
• dafont
• acidfonts has both free and non-free fonts.

Physics

• Sonic the Hedgehog's physics guide is a group of pages explaining in detail how physics are modelled in Sonic the Hedgehog.
• N tutorial A and N tutorial B explain how they did the physics in N: the way of the Ninja.

Other/Miscellaneous

• Tiled map editor. A generic map editor. It seems that the (now depecated) java version was able to export maps in a lua format; current version only exports to XML (boo).
• Procedural Content Generation wiki