[HN Gopher] Kenney.nl: Free Game Assets
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       Kenney.nl: Free Game Assets
        
       Author : memalign
       Score  : 506 points
       Date   : 2025-01-12 05:17 UTC (17 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.kenney.nl)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.kenney.nl)
        
       | Tewboo wrote:
       | Thanks for sharing this website
        
       | ericra wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | gardenerik wrote:
         | It is also stated on every asset page :)
        
       | kxrm wrote:
       | This is nice, will allow for some quick prototyping of game ideas
       | without having to build assets first.
        
       | keyle wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | lovegrenoble wrote:
       | Lots of assets, can't thank you enough!
        
       | Dwedit wrote:
       | What if you run these assets through a Stable Diffusion model
       | (img2img) to generate something else?
        
         | mavamaarten wrote:
         | You would get a generic result probably.
        
         | jsheard wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | TiredOfLife wrote:
         | Nobody knows.
        
         | sigseg1v wrote:
         | I have no clue why someone who wants art as output would do
         | this but you'd probably get some mediocre mishmash out.
        
         | robbomacrae wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | dazzawazza wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | riidom wrote:
         | https://quaternius.com/index.html also worth mentioning.
        
         | rednab wrote:
         | Along the same lines: https://assethunts.itch.io/.
        
           | remram wrote:
           | The license there is custom and a bit ambiguous:
           | https://assethunts.com/license/
        
             | rednab wrote:
             | Ah, good to point out, yeah.
             | 
             | The 'no resale' clause is pretty common for asset packs,
             | but unlike Kenney these definitely aren't CC0.
        
         | soared wrote:
         | Saving for later thanks
        
       | Mydayyy wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | erezsh wrote:
       | On an unrelated note, does anyone know of a website that uses
       | LLMs to generate assets?
        
       | abetusk wrote:
       | 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
        
         | abetusk wrote:
         | 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/
        
           | lelandfe wrote:
           | `<!--Jesus doesn't follow HTML standards-->` in the source :)
        
           | hoistbypetard wrote:
           | It even comes up sometimes in the summary of game jams that
           | are focused on his assets:
           | 
           | https://itch.io/jam/kenney-jam-2019
        
       | ambyra wrote:
       | Are there any good sites like this for game music?
        
         | popcar2 wrote:
         | 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
        
         | zovirl wrote:
         | 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
        
         | hipadev23 wrote:
         | https://luckylionstudios.com has a ton of royalty-free music,
         | it's not free, but it's cheap enough it basically is.
        
       | hombre_fatal wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | cloudking wrote:
         | Any tips for launching on Itch?
        
           | eieio wrote:
           | 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:                   * 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
           | 
           | [1] https://itseieio.itch.io/sisyphus-needs-a-nap
        
             | cloudking wrote:
             | I'm just getting started, thanks this was super helpful!
        
         | makeset wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | friedtofu wrote:
           | 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
        
       | oulipo wrote:
       | 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 ?
        
       | owlninja wrote:
       | 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!
        
         | tom_ wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | freeCandy wrote:
       | My favorite fun fact about Kenney is that he made the Armor Games
       | intro
       | 
       | https://twitter.com/KenneyNL/status/1362768014895157249
        
       | shahzaibmushtaq wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | spsd wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | dested wrote:
       | Kenney deserves all the success and kudos in the universe for his
       | selfless contributions to indie game development.
        
       | torginus wrote:
       | While these assets look neat, models of this complexity are not
       | hard to make by yourself in Blender - I encourage everyone to try
       | it!
        
       | livrem wrote:
       | 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
        
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       (page generated 2025-01-12 23:00 UTC)