Very cool. What tooling do you use/recommend for the "small game over the weekend" scope? I keep running into either the oversized industrial end that requires serious investment to even get out of the gate, or the very lightweight offerings where you have to reinvent everything from scratch.
Not OP, but IMO, Godot. Extremely easy to import assets of any type and prototype a game. The only thing that I would consider a barrier is(if you don't already know how) setting up the initial tilemap and spritesheet. But either using Godot's documentation(which can be found inside of the editor) or through a YouTube tutorial I feel like compared to Unity/UE5 its much better for building quick prototypes.
Plus you can basically put it together in a variety of languages:
It has support for spritesheets of course, but also Tiled map files (https://www.mapeditor.org/) which I use to build level maps.
If I'm building a game that can be implemented via the DOM (like if I don't need an update() loop), I love getting away with just using React or Elm. For example, any sort of grid-based game or board game.
I don't use Godot for browser games because (1) its browser support got worse from v3 -> 4, (2) I just want to write Typescript, and (3) it's just bigger and more complicated. Of course, the best game engine is simply the one that compels you to actually build and hopefully finish games.
Btw, give Pico-8 a shot. In a few months I'd built more games in Pico-8 than I finished across the rest of my life since the scope is so tiny.
I have uploaded several games to itch (although it's been a while) and a cool thing I found was that even with no followers back when I started making things, a decent number of people played some of my games! Nothing crazy, but I remember being delighted that the second game i ever made[1] got a few thousand plays and some actual comments.
My experience is that:
* tags matter! For example, a decent number of people seem to be looking for new incremental games and are willing to try new stuff in that category
* your primary image, title, and description matter a lot and it's worth spending some time taking a good screenshot (I'm really bad at this)
* you can upload a gif instead of just a screenshot to include a little gameplay in your title image and that might help
* participating in gamejams can help a lot because you get some guaranteed players (everyone plays each others games and rates them; maybe you get some feedback too)
I'm not sure where you are in your gamedev journey (there's a good chance you're way ahead of me and this advice is useless!) but "just make some stuff and put it on there and see who bites" was effective and motivating for me early on
Amazing that he's still going after all these years.
Please support him if you use his assets in your game prototypes!... Because by the time you ship a finished game, it will be too late, you'll be completely broke.
Thanks for the good advice. I’m not a game developer but I bought the big sprites pack because he’s been working on it for a lot of years and deserve some compensation.
It's not too brutal. The main stipulation is that the free version is for non-commercial use. You gotta buy the packs for around $10 a pop, and you get get a pretty lax license. Unless you're trying to use Gen AI or NFTs.
I bought that pack like 5 or 6 years anymore, I dont even remember. Insane value, even tho all assets are CC0 license, but the amount of work he puts in just made me like to support it. I still sometimes get emails about updates on the pack. One of the rare cases where I feel like did not pay enough for the amount of value.
I am not even a professional game dev, just dabble in it in my free time. But having so many cohesive art assets at your disposal makes it a lot of un.
Kenney.nl is the hero of the Game Development Programming course I taught at university. Access to high quality free assets allowed my students to not worry about being a great artist and focus on the game programming and game development mechanics that I was trying to teach.
He also makes some (non-free) tools that are fun (says me, not a real game dev or artist).
Asset Forge is for combining 3D models into bigger models. Fun to quickly bash his various free models together to make something more complex. Also comes with a bunch of sets of building blocks. I believe he used this tool to make many of the free assets.
Kenney Shape is like a simple pixel editor, except you also set the height of each pixel and then export the result to a 3D model. Can't explain it well, but it is fun.
Would someone want to do a cute online tutorial to get people started using WebGL with Wave Function Collapse procedural generation, using a cute open-source asset lib like https://kenney.nl/assets/castle-kit ?
I developed a 2D game (in Unity) using Kenney's asset for the first time in 2018 and absolutely recommend it to everyone. Still wanted to release a few small games based on the raw ideas I have.
This is always the showstopper for me. I really want to mess around with making a game but I can't make assets or music to save my life. Maybe this will get me going!
There's enough in there that you can quickly put together something that looks good, and it'll be pretty obvious roughly what it's supposed to be. A lot more satisfying than coloured blocks/ASCII chars/etc. - but, equally, it won't look too good.
I mostly wish there was more resources like this when learning 3d modeling. There's some low poly 3d assets to help with that here, but so many professional level 3d assets just aren't available. The closest is battling with Epic's Paragon assets to get them functioning in Blender.
OpenGameArt has a section for music[0], itch.io also has a bunch of free music assets[1], but do check the license before using them. I use these often and there's some surprisingly great tracks there.
I think it's a fair concept to try if you need to add a few things to complete the game. As long as you're using it yourself and not reselling that. But IANAL and haven't read the copyright.
I bought the massive Kenney asset bundle on itch.io during a sale: https://kenney.itch.io/kenney-game-assets
When I feel like making a small game over the weekend, I can scroll the spritesheets and get ideas just from looking at them. They're so good.
And it's a lot more motivating to work on a game when it looks so good from the start instead of using crappy prototype art I built myself.
Very cool. What tooling do you use/recommend for the "small game over the weekend" scope? I keep running into either the oversized industrial end that requires serious investment to even get out of the gate, or the very lightweight offerings where you have to reinvent everything from scratch.
Not OP, but IMO, Godot. Extremely easy to import assets of any type and prototype a game. The only thing that I would consider a barrier is(if you don't already know how) setting up the initial tilemap and spritesheet. But either using Godot's documentation(which can be found inside of the editor) or through a YouTube tutorial I feel like compared to Unity/UE5 its much better for building quick prototypes.
Plus you can basically put it together in a variety of languages:
https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/scripting/i...
No I'm not affiliated with Godot in any capacity. I've just had a much better experience using it vs the other previously mentioned editors.
There's also lua love and pygame for quick 2D game projects
I use https://excaliburjs.com/docs/ which is a Typescript-first 2D game engine for browser games.
It has support for spritesheets of course, but also Tiled map files (https://www.mapeditor.org/) which I use to build level maps.
If I'm building a game that can be implemented via the DOM (like if I don't need an update() loop), I love getting away with just using React or Elm. For example, any sort of grid-based game or board game.
I don't use Godot for browser games because (1) its browser support got worse from v3 -> 4, (2) I just want to write Typescript, and (3) it's just bigger and more complicated. Of course, the best game engine is simply the one that compels you to actually build and hopefully finish games.
Btw, give Pico-8 a shot. In a few months I'd built more games in Pico-8 than I finished across the rest of my life since the scope is so tiny.
Godot is very easy to get running.
Monogame / C# is also pretty easy, but it's definitely more in the lightweight camp.
Any tips for launching on Itch?
I'm not the parent commenter but:
I have uploaded several games to itch (although it's been a while) and a cool thing I found was that even with no followers back when I started making things, a decent number of people played some of my games! Nothing crazy, but I remember being delighted that the second game i ever made[1] got a few thousand plays and some actual comments.
My experience is that:
I'm not sure where you are in your gamedev journey (there's a good chance you're way ahead of me and this advice is useless!) but "just make some stuff and put it on there and see who bites" was effective and motivating for me early on[1] https://itseieio.itch.io/sisyphus-needs-a-nap
I'm just getting started, thanks this was super helpful!
Kenney is awesome.
OpenGameArt.org (OGA) has a lot of libre/free assets (Kenney often posts on OGA):
https://opengameart.org/
Itch.io also has many CC0 and CC-BY licensed assets:
https://itch.io/game-assets/assets-cc0
https://itch.io/game-assets/assets-cc4-by
I forgot to mention that Kenney has a cult following. Reddit often labels him as "Asset Jesus" [0].
It looks like there's even a site dedicated to Asset Jesus [1].
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/ThemeParkitect/comments/o63nbi/who_...
[1] https://www.assetjesus.com/
It even comes up sometimes in the summary of game jams that are focused on his assets:
https://itch.io/jam/kenney-jam-2019
`<!--Jesus doesn't follow HTML standards-->` in the source :)
Amazing that he's still going after all these years.
Please support him if you use his assets in your game prototypes!... Because by the time you ship a finished game, it will be too late, you'll be completely broke.
Thanks for the good advice. I’m not a game developer but I bought the big sprites pack because he’s been working on it for a lot of years and deserve some compensation.
Can I also recommend Kay Lousberg's work as well: https://kaylousberg.com/
Similar business model and usefulness. A lot of free and you can purchase via itch.
I've used both to prototype many games in Unreal and have bought all their assets.
https://quaternius.com/index.html also worth mentioning.
Saving for later thanks
Along the same lines: https://assethunts.itch.io/.
The license there is custom and a bit ambiguous: https://assethunts.com/license/
It's not too brutal. The main stipulation is that the free version is for non-commercial use. You gotta buy the packs for around $10 a pop, and you get get a pretty lax license. Unless you're trying to use Gen AI or NFTs.
Ah, good to point out, yeah.
The 'no resale' clause is pretty common for asset packs, but unlike Kenney these definitely aren't CC0.
I bought that pack like 5 or 6 years anymore, I dont even remember. Insane value, even tho all assets are CC0 license, but the amount of work he puts in just made me like to support it. I still sometimes get emails about updates on the pack. One of the rare cases where I feel like did not pay enough for the amount of value.
I am not even a professional game dev, just dabble in it in my free time. But having so many cohesive art assets at your disposal makes it a lot of un.
My favorite fun fact about Kenney is that he made the Armor Games intro
https://twitter.com/KenneyNL/status/1362768014895157249
Cool resource.
Took me a bit to find it, so for anyone curious:
"All game assets found on the asset page are public domain CC0 licensed..."
There is a small FAQ if you click Support at the page bottom.
It is also stated on every asset page :)
Kenney.nl is the hero of the Game Development Programming course I taught at university. Access to high quality free assets allowed my students to not worry about being a great artist and focus on the game programming and game development mechanics that I was trying to teach.
He also makes some (non-free) tools that are fun (says me, not a real game dev or artist).
Asset Forge is for combining 3D models into bigger models. Fun to quickly bash his various free models together to make something more complex. Also comes with a bunch of sets of building blocks. I believe he used this tool to make many of the free assets.
Kenney Shape is like a simple pixel editor, except you also set the height of each pixel and then export the result to a 3D model. Can't explain it well, but it is fun.
https://kenney.nl/tools
Would someone want to do a cute online tutorial to get people started using WebGL with Wave Function Collapse procedural generation, using a cute open-source asset lib like https://kenney.nl/assets/castle-kit ?
This is nice, will allow for some quick prototyping of game ideas without having to build assets first.
I developed a 2D game (in Unity) using Kenney's asset for the first time in 2018 and absolutely recommend it to everyone. Still wanted to release a few small games based on the raw ideas I have.
This is always the showstopper for me. I really want to mess around with making a game but I can't make assets or music to save my life. Maybe this will get me going!
I found the 1-bit pack quite inspiring for prototyping purposes: https://www.kenney.nl/assets/1-bit-pack
There's enough in there that you can quickly put together something that looks good, and it'll be pretty obvious roughly what it's supposed to be. A lot more satisfying than coloured blocks/ASCII chars/etc. - but, equally, it won't look too good.
I mostly wish there was more resources like this when learning 3d modeling. There's some low poly 3d assets to help with that here, but so many professional level 3d assets just aren't available. The closest is battling with Epic's Paragon assets to get them functioning in Blender.
While these assets look neat, models of this complexity are not hard to make by yourself in Blender - I encourage everyone to try it!
Are there any good sites like this for game music?
OpenGameArt has a section for music[0], itch.io also has a bunch of free music assets[1], but do check the license before using them. I use these often and there's some surprisingly great tracks there.
[0]: https://opengameart.org/art-search-advanced?field_art_type_t...
[1]: https://itch.io/game-assets/top-rated/free/tag-music
I’ve used music from Kevin MacLeod [0] and Heatly Bros [1] in projects.
[0] https://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/music.html
[1] https://heatleybros.bandcamp.com/music
https://luckylionstudios.com has a ton of royalty-free music, it’s not free, but it’s cheap enough it basically is.
Kenney deserves all the success and kudos in the universe for his selfless contributions to indie game development.
Kenny is great, I used Kenny Shape to draw Yaksha lang logo :)
Lots of assets, can't thank you enough!
Thanks for sharing this website
What if you run these assets through a Stable Diffusion model (img2img) to generate something else?
Then you too can join the ranks of people spamming asset stores with low quality AI generated material. You're at least a year late to that party.
I have no clue why someone who wants art as output would do this but you'd probably get some mediocre mishmash out.
You would get a generic result probably.
I think it's a fair concept to try if you need to add a few things to complete the game. As long as you're using it yourself and not reselling that. But IANAL and haven't read the copyright.
well they're CC0, so no one's stopping you from experimenting. Your results will vary as much as you talent with those tools, I suppose.
Nobody knows.
On an unrelated note, does anyone know of a website that uses LLMs to generate assets?