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Game Assets For Open Source Games?
Ron Harwood writes "As a developer of an open source game - and having zero artistic talent - I find one of the biggest challenges is finding graphics (and potentially sounds) that can be distributed freely. Are there any good repositories of game assets (tiles, sprites, 3D meshes, sounds, music, etc.) out there?"
I've recently 'opened' the creative guts of my animated series (including concepts, technologies, artwork etc), and am in the process of releasing content bit by bit, and it so if you're interested, you can use and modify the stuff already up there at Dustrunners.com or request new assets in the games stream on the site.
It's just getting rolling, but I'm sure there's something there that could help you...
The world's only surviving livewriter.
Someone with a bunch of bandwidth (sourceforge?) definitely should do it. I'd be happy to contribute my game data from days past...
Specifically, I took a couple of sounds for my user interface from Powermanga. The license allows this kind of thing, so why not? In this sense my game is a 'derived work'.
There are of course public domain sounds, and indeed graphics, around. It seems pretty hard to find good ones that you can be sure are genuinely PD.
I, like the poster, have no artistic skill, but I love to program and would love to work on games. Is there something the opposite of what the poster asks, in a way? Is there a site that has the art and game ideas where the people are looking for programmers to make their game? So the concept and all the art would be there, I would just have to make the engine?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Previous discussion on free graphics
Polycount has lots of free graphics. Sure, you'll have to credit the author, but I don't think that's a problem. A friend of mine has an Hack'n'Slash game written in BlitzBasic using a bunch of models he found there. Doesn't look half-bad, either (except for the GUI... that needs work)
Karma: Could be worse (could be raining)
While they aren't free, GarageGames offers content packs. I'd prefer something ala carte, but the screenshots are enticing.
Your best bet for assets is to study all aspects of game design yourself. I taught college game design and I'll tell you what I tell my students.
If you want something done you have to rely on yourself. Don't wait for your key models person to come and save your project. Don't rely on anyone at all. Be sure of your concept, and allow it to grow via the process, but remember that it's yours and you are ultimately responsible for the success or failure of the project. Learn to do the aspects of the game you need yourself. Take the time to learn Maya, and learn Soundforge and learn Photoshop. If you really canâ(TM)t do art at all, you will need to team up with an artist, but I would limit your team to two members until you have a demo. Otherwise you spend all your time managing the team and no time producing your vision.
The folks on the Game Maker forum are generally open with spriting assistance. You've usually gotta have something code-wise to entice them into helping out, but that'll probably be the case in a lot of situations when you need media handouts.
Quake Retexturing Project
http://www.quake.cz/winclan/qe1/
Phillip
Most games these days are staffed for 75% artists and 25% programmers or so. This isn't the Atari 2600 days any more, where a programmer can do the art himself. A good game needs good art. Unfortunately, this problem of having no artists is going to happen a lot with open source games. Lots of coders know about the open source as itâ(TM)s talked about everywhere. But the traditional artist has no clue even what open source is. Outside of finding some talent for your own game, the best bet is trying to get the word out to artists. Let me know what open source is, why we do it. Ask for their help.
But reality says not much is going to change until open source is part of the artist vocabulary. Artists now days are in a state of what programmers were in 10 years ago. "What? Give away my stuff for free? Why? WTF?"
Traditional open source projects have no need for artists (well maybe make up an icon or two). I have no idea how to get thousands of artists to join to open source, and perhaps that should be the subject for another Slashdot post.
Don't give me "I can't draw" like you're proud of it or something.
The last new programming language or algorythm you worked on took studying, right?
visit Learn To Draw and surprise yourself!
you might not end up with the mona lisa, but you'll finish up with something better than the nothing you have right now.
When your game looks reasonable, there will be a better chance of attracting an "artist" to help you.
The community around Polycount tends to be strictly opposed to plagiarism, and it seems to a good idea to ask authors' permission before doing anything to their model (as well as being courteous - they like to know that their models are appreciated :-)
Some models on Polycount don't actually have a permissions statement, meaning that if you want to be picky, it may not even be legal for Polycount to distribute them. Some have non-commercial clauses in the readme, or other encumberances.
Some Q3 models use, or are based on, Quake 3 stock animations - I'm not sure about the copyright status of these, and whether they're a large enough proportion that the model counts as a derived work.
As for "Free" rather than "free", I haven't seen a model on Polycount yet that's freely modifiable, or meets the FSF or OSI guidelines for free software/open source software - so if you want open-source code combined with unmodifiable graphics, that's fine, but if you want your artwork to be licensed in the same way as your code, Polycount is unlikely to help you unless you specifically ask the authors for more permission.