Most of the games I've made so far have made use of freely available art assets. They're either under a creative commons non-commercial license or public domain. I tend to digitally hoard a huge collection of resources I find which I occasionally tap into or use for inspiration. I thought it would be a good idea to share it with others (and to finally organize my massive list).

This blog post was inspired by the blog post titled "Where did you find your art?"  published September 21, 2014 by the developer of Aviary Attorney,  Sketchy Logic. I'll be posting some of their finds below as well.

What is creative commons?

From the creative commons website:

...Every license helps creators — we call them licensors if they use our tools — retain copyright while allowing others to copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work — at least non-commercially. Every Creative Commons license also ensures licensors get the credit for their work they deserve.

Basically there's a bunch of different licences that creators can attach to their art which grants you use of it with a range restrictions depending on the license. The creative commons framework has been adopted by lots of websites, which enables easier search across the web for some great resources waiting to be discovered for your next project.

What is public domain?

When the intellectual property rights on an artistic work have expired, you are free to do anything you want with the images, commercial or otherwise. You don't need to provide credits, although I think it's always a good practice to do so.  People using the creative commons framework can also use a public domain licence for their work.

Every year, Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke University School of Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, puts together an extensive list of expiring U.S. copyrights.

The list

Here's a list of resources to inspire your next work

3D Assets

• Sketchfab
  • You can search for 3D models under various CC licences. Lots of 3D artists publish their work there for anyone to use.
• Poly Pizza
  • 8500+ low poly models rescued from Googles shutdown of Poly in 2021
• https://www.starkcrafts.com/shop
  • Various PSX style models
• Quaternius
  • Various low poly model packs ranging from nature, buildings, people, food.
• Julio Sillet 3D Art
  • Lots of high quality PBR material collections
• Everything asset library
  • David O Reilly, the developer of Everything provided all the assets from the game free to use
• Massive Library of Free 3D Character Animations
  • Over 2,000 animations obtained from mocap.cs.cmu.edu converted to an easy to use format for game engines. Someone should make a game where you dance on the beach at sunset. 

2D Assets 

• Artvee
  • Browse and download high-resolution, public domain artworks.
  • Examples
    • Here's a cool collection of insect art I found. Maybe a cool idea for a card game
    • Or how about some birds
    • You can sort by art movements , culture, and topic
      
• Wikimedia Commons
  • 90 million+ freely usable media files. Try searching for something like “lithographs” or “art by subject”. Some knowledge on art history would help a lot here. 
  • Examples
    • The Private and Public Lives of Animals. These are the character assets used in Aviary Attorney
    • Nice backgrounds that would work really well in a visual novel, or ttrpg. Here’s one example.  Here’s another. 
    • These would make for a beautiful card game about animals.
      
    • You want some unusual RPG characters? How about a rag-tag group of Spaniards?
      
• Old Book Art
  • Art, maps & images from old books, atlases and other antiquarian sources
  • Their scrapbook section has some beautiful art
• National Agricultural Library Digital Collections
  • Access to full-text historical documents in the agricultural and food sciences.
  • Here's 7000+ watercolor images of fruit 
• Museums
  • Lots of museums have open access to all the art work in their collection under a public domain or non-commercial license.
    • The Met. Browse more than 492,000 works that you can filter by material, location, era, and department
    • The Smithsonian Institution. 4.4 million 2D and 3D digital items from their collections
    • Tokyo National Museum. This one is a bit hard to browse but they have a database full of old maps, art prints, and photographs
    • Looks like the MOMA already curated a pretty good list so I'm just going to post that

• Internet Archive
  • The Internet’s biggest collection of public domain files. Check the license before you download something and use your best judgement. Sometimes I find work on their that is clearly not public domain but someone uploaded it claiming it was.
  • Browsing is difficult but luckily a scholar uploaded 2.6 million images from the Internet Archive to this flickr album, which makes navigation much easier. 
  • There's tons of amazing stuff here. Here's a list curated from the  "Where did you find your art?"  blog post
    • Finding lithograph backgrounds suitable for a visual novel or RPG is dead easy. Here’s one example. Here’s another (scroll down a little).
    • Furniture manuals and catalogs often have great background illustrations of rooms. Scroll through this to find some interesting-looking background art for a visual novel.
      
    • Want to make an unusual card game? Here are some bizarre square/circular illustrations from Latin book on astrology and meteorology, written in 1698.
      
    • One example of potential RPG character portraits. There are tons of books like this.
      
    • The adventures of a suave pilgrim. I would play that.
      
    • A visual novel set in the Italian countryside? I would play that too.
      
    • I have no idea how I would use these, but they’re bursting with personality.
    • There’s a nice mix of simple backgrounds and backgroundless characters in this book.
    • There’s a nice mix here too, if you don’t mind the religious subject matter.
      
    • There are tons of illustrated books on the founding, exploration, and development of the USA. Here’s one example. Could make for a nice Oregon Trail 2 with a little imagination.

Music Assets

• Internet Archive
  • The music I used in The Golden Tower was by experimental/avant garde band Bull of Heaven. All of their work is in the public domain. A lot of their music is EXTREMELY long, moody and atmospheric. You can easily find some sections of a song you want to use to match an evocative, dreamy or ethereal feel to parts of your game.
• Free Music Archive
  • Lots of artists from various genres. You can search by tag , genre and license . The music I used for Solastalgia and city::ephemera is from experimental ambient and drone musician Blear Moon. I also cut up and edited some aggressive noise music from techtheist for Solastalgia.
• SoundCloud
  • You can filter by Creative Commons but be aware that some tracks are copyrighted material uploaded by users under a CC license. 
• Youtube
  • You can filter by Creative Commons but it has the same issue as SoundCloud. So use your best judgement and read the description to see if it was originally created the uploader.
• International Music Score Library Projecte
  • Tons of music from around the world. Looks like most of it is under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License which allows you to use it for even commercial work if you provide credits. Check out the random button to find some inspiration.
• Bandcamp
  • Bandcamp has tons of incredibly unique music. I use it primarily to find more underground and experimental music. Unfortunately there's no robust search tools to find music listed under a CC license. Sometimes I get lucky though and find some manually. 
    • https://forgottendawn-main.bandcamp.com/ Lots of atmospheric music. I discovered this musician after hearing their music in the games made by https://benlap.itch.io/ 
    • The music from WOBNIARYVARG is from synthpop band  disasteradio. Most of their music is under a Attribution-NonCommercial license
    • https://pavillon36-recordings.bandcamp.com/ "Abstract Beats, IDM, Glitch, Breakcore, Jungle & all the strange sounds you can imagine in between" Makes me want to make a walking sim set in an alien club. Same CC license as above.

Sound FX Assets

• freesound.org
  • The OG. The GOAT. I've used this site like 20 years ago for some old gamemaker games and it still looks the same and is still my go to for easy to find sounds.
• 99 Sounds
  • A lot of high quality sound packs. Cinematic impacts, field recordings, glitchy effects, drones,  foley.
• GDC Royalty Free Sound Effects
  • This one is massive. Each year  thousands of dollars worth of sounds are given for free in celebration of the Game Developers Conference. All of the sound effects are royalty free and commercially usable with no attribution required.
• Youtube
  • Search using a Creative Commons filter. Cheat code for high quality foley sound effects -> Search for ASMR.
    

Aside: AI Art Assets

The software landscape for AI generated art is getting massive. On top of all the text to image models, we're now getting to the point where you can generate 3D models, animation, sound effects, and music from a text prompt. These tools seem to be improving exponentially so no doubt that all of these will look outdated fast. I was recently blown away this generative voice model that creates extremely convincing synthetic voices.

There's a lot of ethical debate around AI generated art. Licences aren't clear and different trained models seem to be blatantly exploitive of other artists works who didn't consent.  A class action lawsuit has been filed against the major AI art tools for training on billions of copyrighted images. Creative Commons wrote an interesting article addressing the future of copyright laws in relation to AI. 

I personally don't see much of a reason to use them currently given the amount of free resources that already exist on the internet. But there's no question that the creation of art is becoming even more accessible with these tools. Creating your own model based on your own art or using public domain trained image model to create variations seems like one incredible use case. Hopefully we enter a world with ethical and fair usage of these tools. Given the current trend though perhaps we're reaching the end of times.

Food for thought: Play Shell Song by Everest Pipkin

Conclusion

Well this has turned into more of an essay than I originally planned. Hopefully you find this list useful. It's only a tiny portion of all the incredible resources out there. I'll likely create more posts like this sharing more resources as I discover them. There's also a whole separate list of tools I have which would probably be a good post too. In the meantime, here's an excellent curated list of tools by Alienmelon.

Have fun with all these assets. If the license allows it, remix it, filter it, morph it,  recontextualize it. Despite being flooded with a billion of pieces of free to use art, many people still feel the need to create something new from scratch. To always be producing.  Artist Kara Stone has an interesting AMAZE talk about the creation of their game unearthu which uses 100% recycled assets to lessen the environmental impacts of game development. 

One last note. If you can afford it, consider donating to the people that provide these resources. They're often created by one person and supporting them directly will help a lot.