Free Game Resources
Links to free stuff (Creative Commons-licensed and the like) that can be used in game creation.
Contents
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/
- http://game-icons.net/ Many icons (and emoji) in SVG Licensed CC-BY with some even Public Domain.
3D:
Software:
- Freegamedev's list of 2D and 3D software.
- graphicsgale
- Pixothello
- ASEPrite
- Texturepacker (has free & paid versions)
- Slate A simple bitmap editor for 2D tilesets.
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 915 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.
- [1](Programming M. C. Kids) Describes how they did platforms in the old days
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.
