I Have A Large List Of Sites For 2D Art... And I Want To Share With You

As the title says I have been scouring the Internet for years looking for places that have free and paid 2D art and built up quite a list in the process.

I know there must be a lot of people out there who are basically like I was (and still am in many ways) either a programmer with little art skill or little patience to do the work.

Believe me I know what it's like to want to make a game and the art needs just overwhelm you. It's damn frustrating. You really want to make that game and this one part just kind of sucks the motivation out of you and kills the project.

Think I just might be able to help you out by by sharing some of my resources with you. Some of these are thrown around quite often so you may have already seen them. Others I have never seen listed on any game dev community or most any site for that matter. I found them through hours and hours (and then stack many more hours on top of that) of searching and linking around often to dead-ends.

But I am not going to list them all right here right now (although they might all be here depending on when you find this thread).

Instead I will update this post once per day or week (whatever) adding a new resource. The reason I am doing this is so you can take your time and really dig into each resource and it makes it so I don't need to sit here and list them all at one time.

Just a note here: I'd credit to it somewhere (this is something I think should be done any time you use free art created by someone else whether they require it or not... kind of a common courtesy).

Are you ready? Great! Here we go.


Name: The Universal LPC Sprite Sheet Character

What is it?
Imagine you want to make a top down RPG something like the old 8-bit or 16-bit RPGs. Or a similar game. How on earth will you make all of those characters and perhaps an Orc or skeleton or two? This is how. With this generator you can fully customize a character that has a complete sprite sheet of animations for everything you need. Choose eyes, ears, male, female, weapons, clothing, armor, etc. Fastest way you will ever make quality unique 2D characters for your RPG game.

How can you use it?
Prototyping & references for your own drawing.
Any game released as freeware (an initial supporter of the LPC was the Free Software Foundation) and open source.
This tool creates animated sprites based on the LCP Sprite Sheet which is a modified version of a spritesheet that originated here: http://lpc.opengameart.org/ (and in fact that may interest you as well).


Name: Ari Feldman's Sprite Lib

What is it?
A large collection of sprites completely free for you to use for various games including a fish game, a tank battle game, an Arkanoid game, racing game, a caveman platform game, shmups and more. All done in lowres pixel art (he actually created these 20 years ago for his games).

How can you use it?
"for any use (e.g. shareware or commercial applications, including iOS and Android games)"


Name: Fantasy-Themed Avatar Images

What is it?
A large collection (around 700) of fantasy-themed avatar images originally created for a game competition.

How can you use it?
for any use including commercial as long as you include attribution. It is licensed under Creative Commons attribution 3.0


Name: Backyard Ninja Design Free Stuff

What is it?
A large collection of sprites and tiles originally created for use in the author's games. Basically lots of great stuff worth checking out.

How can you use it?
"Just to clarify, any of the art assets(sprites sheets, animations, tiles sets) I put up for display on here are free to be used commercially, just give me proper credit if you use them. If you have any questions or concerns, shoot me a mail" [email is available on the page]


Name: Glitch Game's Public Domain Art

What is it?
A large collection of art originally created for Glitch (a web-based massively multiplayer game). This is some very well done art.

How can you use it?
Tiny Speck, Inc., the game’s developer, has relinquished its ownership of copyright over these 10,000+ assets in the hopes that they help others in their creative endeavours and build on Glitch’s legacy of simple fun, creativity and an appreciation for the preposterous. Go and make beautiful things.
For the technically minded this has been released into the Public Domain (probably my favorite type).


note: updated the link on 09/30/2016 because original page no longer exists
Name: SYNSO Game Series "Abuse My IP & Make Games" Pixel Art

What is it?
A large collection of art originally used for the SYNSO (that's Squid Yes! Not So Octopus) series of games.

How can you use it?
Rob from RetroRemakes says "I want you to make games ... Use any of these resources apart from the logos or the name SYNSO in any game without credit required. ... Create your own SYNSO game for non commercial purposes ... Make your own game set within the SYNSO universe for non commercial purposes".
So basically, just don't make a SYNSO game clone or a game set in that univers and you can use these assets for any game free or commercial without even needing to credit him. Although I think it is always a great thing to thank people who are giving you something for free. Common courtesy and all that.


Name: Crateboy's Work From 2007 to 2014
This is on itch.io and you may choose to or not to give him a donation when downloading.
But geesh there is a lot in here.

What is it?
A 28 MB zip file containing a load of stuff created by this person between the time he was 12 and 19. He says "This [is a] collection of stuff (300+ files) ... There is so much stuff in here, some of it is good, some of it is crap, you'll probably find something useful if you look hard enough! When I was younger and made all this stuff the only thing I wanted more than a girlfriend was for people to enjoy what I made. Do young Crateboy a favor and sneak something of his into your game... after all, some of it is actually pretty cool... and maybe even useful."
More specifically you get pixel art, color palettes, audio and more!

How can you use it?
"[It's] entirely creative commons, you can do what you want with it as long as it's good in spirit, you don't try to pass it off as your own or try to sell the individual components of this kit ... If you use something, mention my name!"
So there you have it. Basically don't be an ass. Use it in your game as needed and credit the guy.


Name: Gar's Vampaders Sprites and Sound FX made with Bfxr


What is it?
A small collection of sprites & sound FX that I created for my recent game Vampaders From The Planet Unity. The download (next to "Name" above) is a zip containing the individual sprite sheets inside the gfx folder and about 10 sound fx inside the snds folder.

How can you use it?
You can use these in any game regardless of it being free or not. There is not a lot in there and they are certainly not fancy but if something helps you out go ahead and use it.


Enjoy!

 

Love it! My one feature suggestion for the website: A randomize button.

 

Updated the original post listing Ari Feldman's SpriteLib.

Remember with any of these resources I am sharing you can easily make them unique for your game simply by recoloring the images as you like.

 

Wow, that's super cool!

 

They're basically sprite sheets. They don't take long to evaluate. If it takes more than a few minutes you're doing something wrong

Note the SA part in the licence. Read the CC page carefully! Or the plain English explanations:
http://sarafhawkins.com/creative-commons-licenses-explained-plain-english/

 

Yeah, share alike is pretty restrictive. It basically means you have to give away any game you make with the assets. Which makes it pretty difficult to use for comercial games.

I tend to stick to CC0 or something I've paid for.

 

I'm just listing the resources I think are interesting. People can do with them what they like. I think you killjoys (lol) have brought up a great point... I should include a brief bit about the license in the listing.

Of course I've always looked for things that are completely usable with no strings attached. That is the ideal. But about anything works fine for prototyping.

 

The CC SA license is really not clear about what exactly constitutes a "work". I personally understand it to be strictly related to the licensed item itself and not the full work it's used in. For instance, if I alter and use an audio file in my game, and that audio file is CC SA, then I believe only have to share the newly altered audio file, and not the entire game. In other words, that audio file becomes a new work, and that new work is the item covered under the CC SA license.

It's so confusing (to me) about what's actually covered that we might as well avoid using anything with CC SA altogether. I've never used anything with that license so I'm just talking off the top of my head here.

 

Updated original post adding Fantasy-Themed Avatar Images, Backyard Ninja Design Free Stuff and Glitch Game's Public Domain Art.

Also added a new section describing how the each art "pack" can be used.

 

@GarBenjamin, well this thread got me in a giving mood so...

Way back when, I made a set of seamless tiling terrain textures for a flight sim, and they were used after that in a few other projects. We sold them commercially for a while but that was back in the day. Anyway, I just I packed up the full set of 238 textures and put them up for free download (CC 4.0). Hopefully someone can find some use in them.

Here's the link: http://howintheworld.com/textures/ -- They're downloadable through OpenGameArt.org

 

That's awesome. Thanks for sharing. I am sure people will get some use out of these!

 

Same here.

I'm having a question about the CC BY 4.0 license in general. It seems to be the same license that Allegorithmic use for their content here:
https://share.allegorithmic.com/
License:
https://www.allegorithmic.com/legal/substance-share

I've talked with "Jerc" over on polycount about this. He said:

This is the thread:
http://polycount.com/discussion/157560/substance-share-is-here#latest

I had made another lengthy post about my concerns with the CC BY 4.0 license there because I prefer "crystal clear" terms over "a little blurry".

Seems like Jerc doesn't have an account here. Maybe @Wesm has some news on the licensing topic for us? Do you know if a clearer (custom) license is going to replace CC BY 4.0 on substance share in the future?

 

Thanks Gar, awesomely generous work. Thank you too Ony

 

You're welcome. They are just sitting in my bookmarks. I'll continue to share until we get through them all.

 

If you're listing 2D art for use, Kenny is a good addition. (http://kenney.nl/) He releases his work as public domain. It's great for prototyping with because if you accidentally leave something in your game, you haven't broken any rules.

To raise some funds, Kenny originally sells some of the artwork in various packages. Then over time, they're made available for anyone to download. Paying just gets you early access.

There is also now some 3D art available. Kenny is including Unity packages for that art.

You may recognize some of the Kenny art from the Asset Store. I've seen multiple scripting packages use his art in their demo scenes.

 

Have you guys thought about using a wiki page for that? I mean forum thread will eventually get buried anyway.

 

@Socrates Basically. I was just sharing the sites I've collected over the years. Kenny is on the list but I'm focusing on the sites that are not as well known first. Things like Kenny and OpenGameArt I'll list near the end.

@neginfinity yeah that is another reason I am adding sites over time. I'm planning on adding a page to my own site for it as well. I almost just did it there to begin with and decided ah wth I'll just make a thread here to kick it off. So, I'll do probably a couple more on this thread and then just link from the thread to my own website page for the complete list.

 

Long overdue for an update. Sorry about that. I meant to post before now and was active on other threads and then got caught up making a Space Invaders game in my free time. lol

Anyway, I just added SYNSO Game Series "Abuse My IP & Make Games" Pixel Art to the list above.

Also added Crateboy's Work From 2007 to 2014.

Also added the graphics & sounds from my Vampaders From The Planet Unity game.

 

Hey @GarBenjamin thanks for this amazing resource! I too am planning on creating a list of free asset resources with a focus on pixel art, and this compiled list was too good to pass up! I've created the list here, with modified descriptions, a preview image of the assets from each resource, and a quick reference to each resource's licensing. I gave you full credit at the top of the post for having the bulk of the work done!

I plan on adding more as I find them!

 

Glad you found it useful.

That is a nice site you have I am sure I'll visit it from time to time.

 

@GarBenjamin Thanks! It's a bit barebone right now, as I'm getting things started. But I plan on building the site over time to have an abundance of pixel art resources!