Getting Resources

There are many great games on the YoYo Games site. But one of the things I noticed is that quite a large number of good games have rather poor sprites, backgrounds, and other resources. This is unfortunate because, even though game play is the most important aspect of a game, it also has to look right. When a game does not look right people often don’t even try to play it. And a good looking game also adds to the atmosphere and increases the joy of playing it.

Creating good game sprites is an art and people that are good at designing or implementing games are often not good at creating sprites. So for most of you here, creating the resources is probably a difficult job that you do not really like. So how do you get the good sprites for your game?

Well, first of all, don’t use illegal sprite sets of commercial games. This is obviously illegal and you are breaking both the rules for YoYo Games and the law. But actually, there is a different community out there of people who are very good at creating sprites and other resources but are unable to create the games. They would love to see their creations being used in games. So you can use their work, but of course ask for permission and give proper credit.

So how do you get those resources? Well first of all, there are a number of Resource Packs available on YoYo Games. There is also the Resources Section where everybody can upload their own resources. We plan to improve this section of the website considerably in the future. Also YoYo Games will commission artists to create professional quality resource packs that Game Maker users can use for free in their games. These can be found in the sprites folder of your Game Maker installation directory (e.g. C:\Program Files\Game Maker 8\Sprites).

An index of the resources posted at the GMC is available at Game Making Resources.

A considerable number of highly-quality resources is also provided free of charge with the book The Game Makers’ Apprentice to make a number of interesting games.

If you want sprites for a fangame, you can find many ripped sprites and some fan-made sprites of a variety of video games at http://www.spriters-resource.com/

But for many more resources you best contact the people in the communities where they create them. Here are some useful links to places where you might be able to contact such people:


 * http://www.panelmonkey.org/forums/
 * http://www.penciljack.com/
 * http://www.conceptart.org/
 * http://forums.sijun.com/
 * http://www.gfxartist.com/
 * http://www.pixelalley.com/
 * http://raph.com/3dartists/
 * http://www.forum.animacia.sk/
 * http://www.cgchat.com/forum/
 * http://z4.invisionfree.com/pixelclass/index.php?act=idx
 * GMC Topic: Graphics Resources

(please add new ones you find to this list)

If you are not as interested in sprites or logos, see some sound sites:


 * http://www.vgmusic.com
 * http://www.grsites.com/archive/sounds/
 * GMC Topic: Sound Resources List

(please add new ones you find to this list)

There is a tool that generates sounds here: http://www.drpetter.se/project_sfxr.html

Hopefully this helps you getting into contact. Here is also some tips on how to find a sprite artist.

And of course you can Google the web with keywords like spriters or sprite artist or pixel art or spriting (this keyword is especially useful to find guides on how to create your own sprites.)