Guide:Assets

Free resources to help you put games together. Often they're called assets, it means the different images, music files, sound effects and other materials that goes into games.

Sometimes these pages disappear, some times the free selection's really limited. If stuff's not actually useful feel free to delete.

NB: The See Also section at the bottom has lots of links to places that don't fit neatly into other categories, for example sites with multiple different kinds of assets.

3-D Models

• 123dapp - Models from 3-D scanners and simple modelling tools.
• Kawaii Tanks - Tank model with flexible tracks on the Unity asset store. Not actually v kawaii ;)
• A Large Dataset of Object Scans - 3-D scans, in .PLY format (can open in MeshLab and Blender.
• NASA 3D Resources - Space things on the Internet Archive.
• Blend Swap
• Low Poly Cars
• Sweet Home 3D - list of places with free resources.
• The Models Resource - Version of The Spriters Resource for 3-D models, so stuff ripped from released videogames.
• The Base Mesh - '1000+ Base Meshes. 100% Free. CC0 License.'

Fonts

• Font Library - Libre fonts.
• free-fonts - Libre fonts.
• Font Squirrel
• The League of Moveable Type - Libre fonts, pretentious website ;3
• VTF - Libre fonts.
• bitfontmaker2/gallery - Fonts made with Bitfontmaker2.
• Kitchen Sink - Free/pay-what-you-want, monospace font with drawing characters.
• BADASS LIBRE FONTS BY WOMXN
• UnifontEX - Pixel font with great support for extra characters, emoji, etc.

General Audio

• iLife Stock Music and Sound Effects
• Soundimage.org - Music, sounds, textures. Attribution licence.
• SampleSwap - Samples, music, sound effects.
• Musical Artifacts - All sorts of files useful for music-making on a computer.

General Images

• Image*After
• PUB•DOM•OR•DIE
• 50,000 Ultimate Web Graphics on archive.org
• Corel Gallery 1,000,000 on archive.org
• CorelGALLERY 1.3 million pictures - 16 CDs (Win95) on archive.org
• watering a flower art assets - CC0, attribution appreciated. From the game watering a flower
• Art Bits from HyperCard - Lots of great 2-colour graphics.
• Hypercard Graphics Pack - Another pack of graphics from HyperCard, dunno if they're both the same stuff.
• Internet Design Shop Clipart - Graphics from WebPage Designer Gold by Boomerang Software.
• Has Graphics
• GifCities - Internet Archive's Geocities archive GIF search.
• Faces for your RPG Characters
• Random Personal Picture Finder - Bing searches for images using default camera filenames.
• Demons Asset Pack - Scanned drawings in raster and vector.
• game-icons.net
• Pixel Sea - Search 32×32 and 88×31 graphics.
• Photo and Clip Art CD-ROMs - Collection on Internet Archive.

Music

• Royalty-Free Music by Kevin MacLeod. Licence: CC BY 3.0
• nosoapradiotracks - Music bits (Google Drive)
• RMN Music Pack - Music from the rpgmaker.net community.
• Free Music Archive

MIDI

• Archive Team: The Geocities MIDI Collection - A large collection of MIDI filces recused from Geocities.
• vanBasco's MIDI Search
• artscene.textfiles.com/music/midi/
• My Music page on Luli Site (Wayback Machine).
• Russian Midi Page!
• John Torp's Music - Original Midi
• Music directory in the EasyRPG RTP is all MIDI. To download single directories from Git repos see: Guide:Git#Tools

MOD

• The Mod Archive

Samples

Bits of sounds for music-making.

• Free MIDI Chords - Okay, not actually samples, but an open-source repository of MIDI chords.
• WaveWorld archive - Bitorrent or HTTP downloads, WAV and MP3 format.
• Free Wave Samples
• Fairlight CMI IIx samples
• Free! Fairlight Series III Factory Library mapped and looped
• Fairlight CMI Sound Library Revision 1.3 (WAV)
• FreePats - Instrument samples in a variety of formats.
• Sample and Sample-Patch CDs - Collection on Internet Archive.
• 90's Old School Sample CDs Collection - Massive collection of 90s sample CDs, also on Internet Archive]].
• Adventure Kid Waveforms - Small (as in one cycle) samples formatted for various instruments.
• Free Samples and Sample Packs from Emma.
• Free Sample Packs page on Seaweed Factory.
• Drum Machine Archive - Over 2.5GB of hardware drum machine samples.
• Halley Resource Center - Sample packs and stems by em. Lots of other cool stuff on their site too.
  • For example this page that features a random rave stab every day: https://msx.horse/stab.php

Palettes

• gamemaking.tools/downloads/assets/Palettes/

RPG Maker Related

• GrandmaDebsLittleBits
• Crum: Asset Pack for Marek & Co. - Big pile of different things.
• RPG Maker 2003 Monsters by everythingstaken

Shaders

HLSL

High-Level Shading Language, used in Unity.

• Unity 5.x Shaders and Effects Cookbook, authors both have free tutes:
  • Alan Zucconi
  • Kenneth Lammers
• UCLA Wireframe Shader
• Advanced Wireframe Shader
• Screen Space Fluids
• Star Nest Skybox
• Free shaders on the Unity Asset Store
• Retro3D - PlayStation-like shader. 'Basically, it's a kind of unlit shader, but also reduces the precision of geometric operations, and cancels the perspective correction for texture mapping.'
  • Versions with lighting: github.com/GuiglParty/Stage-Fright/tree/master/Assets/Retro3D
  • Flashback '94 - Another PSX-y shader set ($20).
  • psx_retroshader - Another one.
  • com.hauntedpsx.render-pipelines.psx - Most advanced one, not just a shader.

GLSL

OpenGL Shading Language, used in Godot (kinda). Godot 2 had a visual shader editor, and I believe this is in development for Godot 3.1 :)

• Curly Brace's Github has lots of Godot shader stuff

Converters

Tools for converting shaders between languages

• HLSL to GLSL Converter
• HLSL to GLSL Source Converter
• Unity Shadertoys (a.k.a Converting GLSL shaders to Cg/HLSL) - info

See Also

• shadertoy.com - Browse free shaders. Pretty demanding website D:

Sound Effects

• BBC Sound Effects
• Free music samples: download loops, hits and multis - Music Radar.
• FREE Retro Arcade Video Game Sound Effects
• freetousesounds.com - Guy's field recordings. Are they actually free?
  • freetousesounds on Bandcamp.
• Sound Effects Greatest Hits - SFX disc archived by Max Anderson.
• Freesound - Creative Commons sounds.
• 99Sounds
• The Sounds Resource - Version of The Spriters Resource for sound effect, so stuff ripped from released videogames.

Sprites

• SpriteLib
• Pixel Monster Bot - Great little 5×5 pixel mons. Free to use for whatever.
• The Spriters Resource - Graphic rips (and some edits) from games.
• videogamesprites.net

Textures / Tiles

• 1078 Weird Textures (there's a ZIP of all the textures in the subfolder there too). Link needs replacing.
• lsdtexs Rip of textures from LSD Dream Emulator. Can't remember where I found them :( Link needs replacing.
• Decorative Papers, found by the community from the Mechanical Curator Collection
• Genetica Texture Packs They're in an odd format (.GTX), but can be converted with a program on the site (I should convert and upload these). You can also just download versions of them, one-by-one as .JPG files.
• Textures.com. You can limit your search to textures that tile seemlessly, but not everything seems to be filed correctly. Has a nice preview feature too. You'll have to either use 'view page info' or an adblocker to bypass their little download protection ;)
• Hex World: Realistic Hex Textures for Maps
• ＥＭ－Ｓｑｕａｒｅ Ｐａｔｔｅｒｎｓ - SVG tiling patterns.
• Sweet Home 3D - list of places with free resources.
• Sprite Walls - drawings by Clyde.
• Zanzindorf - From photos.
• Pixar One Twenty Eight - Free repeating textures (with normal and bump maps), by Pixar. CC BY 4.0 licence.
• Pixar One Thirty - Another set with the same licence.
• Random Pattern Generator - Mastodon and Twitter bots that sometimes post interesting, tileable gradients. Each version seems to have different posts? Includes instructions on how to generate them.
  • KlongDor - related somehow...
• Pattern Generator - Browser-based.
• Texture Library Previews page on the RENDER96 Wiki. Links to stock texture CD rips on Internet Archive. Wiki itself is a cool investigation of the sources of textures used in videogames.
• TextureTown - Has a cool 3-D texture testing environment too.
  • + Texture of the Day + - Bot posting TextureTown's texture of the day.
• The Textures Resource - Version of The Spriters Resource for textures, so stuff ripped from released videogames.
• Pattern World - CD-ROM on Internet Archive.

See Also

• The Asset Creation section of the wiki, for tools to help you make your own.
• The Generative section of this wiki, for tools to generate assets.
• opengameart.org - All-sorts, graphics, sounds—
• Openverse - Creative Commons search engine (was search.creativecommons.org)
• Unity's Asset Store
• Free and not-free assets on itch.io
• post.lurk.org/@wendy/100734030623295814 - Mastodon thread with CC resources.
• Artlantis 3D Resources
• Game Creator's Pack - Creative Commons asset pack.
• Share CG
• slackermedia.info/sprints/ - Directory of all sorts of things.
• Assets by Kenny
• scrapheap - Github repo with a bunch of different things.
• musty old scraps - Various things from unfinished games, by hugs.
• Useful Resources on the Clickteam website. Sounds, graphics, and some links to other places.
• The Free Site on the Wayback Machine.
• Shooting Game Developer Uploader
• The VG Resource (forum) and The VG Resource Wiki - Central locations for the Spriters Resource (etc.) sites.
• Game Resources - Lots of links on OHRRPGCE's wiki.