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Game developer resources

Sound effects resources

An open community database of sfx, mfx and gfx. Aimed at the indie devs. Quality varies.

Tags: Yes
Categories: No
Star ratings: No
Approx number of sound effects: 360

Open source, huge database. Good community feel.

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Categories: No
Star ratings: Yes
Approx number of sound effects: 151574

A fairly large database of free, good quality sound effects, for use in your games or videos.

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Categories: Yes
Star ratings: No
Approx number of sound effects: 5510

Large collection of royalty free sound effects and music with a nice interface. Decent prices.

Over 100,000 music tracks, with a handy sub-genre search, and over 47,000 sound effects. The sound effects are awkwardly categorized as a genre.

Formerly iStockPhoto Audio.

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Categories: Yes
Star ratings: No
Approx number of sound effects: 47000

Over a million sound effects, on a site that claims to have been around since 1997. Approximately $3 per sound effect.

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Star ratings: No
Approx number of sound effects: 1120000

Professionally designed game sound effects at very affordable prices.

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Categories: Yes
Star ratings: Yes
Approx number of sound effects: 8076

Fairly extensive collection of some nice graphics for your games. Most of them are free, and there’s some gems in there. They also offer some paid assets, for a low price.

Tags: No
Categories: No
Star ratings: No
Approx number of sound effects: 360

Large collection of royalty free sounds and music.

Tags: No
Categories: Yes
Star ratings: No
Approx number of sound effects: 2750

A collection of packaged sound effects of good quality, particularly sci-fi sounds effects.

Some are paid, and some are available for free, and royalty-free

Tags: No
Categories: No
Star ratings: No
Approx number of sound effects: 1200

Large collection purchasable sound effects, organized into categories, with particularly good tagging, and a very nice interface. Price is approximately $3 per sound effect, but also has a subscription model where you pay an amount per month for a certain amount of sounds per month.

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Categories: Yes
Star ratings: No
Approx number of sound effects: 219000

Medium sized set of sounds presented with a moderately usable interface

Tags: Yes
Categories: No
Star ratings: Yes
Approx number of sound effects: 1500

A large database of sound effects, organised into categories, with tags. Prices from $1, up to around $5.

Tags: Yes
Categories: Yes
Star ratings: No
Approx number of sound effects: 663000

Music resources

An open community database of sfx, mfx and gfx. Aimed at the indie devs. Quality varies.

Tags: Yes
Categories: No
Star ratings: No
Approx number of music tracks: 528

Good commercial music, good price. Fairly large rap beats focus - but most suit any purpose. Typically high tempo.

Tags: No
Categories: Yes
Star ratings: No
Approx number of music tracks: 750

Great interface for good quality music. Large database.

Tags: Yes
Categories: Yes
Star ratings: No
Approx number of music tracks: 123646

Large collection of royalty free sound effects and music with a nice interface. Decent prices.

Over 100,000 music tracks, with a handy sub-genre search, and over 47,000 sound effects. The sound effects are awkwardly categorized as a genre.

Formerly iStockPhoto Audio.

Tags: No
Categories: Yes
Star ratings: No
Approx number of music tracks: 108000

A decent collection of creative commons licensed music for podcasts, videos, games and so on.

Tags: Yes
Categories: No
Star ratings: No
Approx number of music tracks: 6000

Royalty-free music available for purchase. Although the interface is a bit dated, the selection is quite nice. Interestingly they also make available their entire catalogue of music for $38.

Tags: Yes
Categories: Yes
Star ratings: No
Approx number of music tracks: 1340

A huge collection of music and loops, including creative commons licensed

Tags: Yes
Categories: Yes
Star ratings: Yes
Approx number of music tracks: 300000

A great modern site for a large collection of music tracks at fairly low prices

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Categories: Yes
Star ratings: Yes
Approx number of music tracks: 88000

Nice set of $5 music tracks

Tags: Yes
Categories: No
Star ratings: No
Approx number of music tracks: 150

Bensound is an attractive website with royalty free music available for purchase, for use in YouTube videos, video games, and the like. The music tracks are categorised, and the site is clean and pleasant to use.

Tags: Yes
Categories: Yes
Star ratings: No
Approx number of music tracks: 197

Large collection of royalty free sounds and music.

Tags: No
Categories: Yes
Star ratings: No
Approx number of music tracks: 250
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Categories: Yes
Star ratings: No
Approx number of music tracks: 400

Graphics resources

Some great graphics here, including the tileset for Tyrian, freely available.

Tags: No
Categories: No
Star ratings: No
Approx number of graphics: 250
3D: No
2D: Yes

An open community database of sfx, mfx and gfx. Aimed at the indie devs. Quality varies.

Tags: Yes
Categories: No
Star ratings: No
Approx number of graphics: 2496
3D: Yes
2D: Yes

Excellent 3D model packs, A couple of packs is typically enough for a pro 3D game.

Tags: No
Categories: Yes
Star ratings: No
Approx number of graphics: 1000
3D: Yes
2D: No

3DOcean is a large database of 3D assets produced by a community of artists, including models, textures, shaders, and scripts. For a monthly fee, an unlimited amount of assets can be downloaded. The site is now part of Envato.

Tags: Yes
Categories: Yes
Star ratings: No
Approx number of graphics: 63000
3D: Yes
2D: No

A great collection of vector graphics ideal for indie computer game design and development

Tags: No
Categories: Yes
Star ratings: No
Approx number of graphics: 100
3D: No
2D: Yes

A large, modern marketplace for Blender files. Many are creative commons licensed.

Tags: Yes
Categories: Yes
Star ratings: No
Approx number of graphics: 6600
3D: Yes
2D: No

A site that specialises in icons for your game’s UI

Tags: Yes
Categories: No
Star ratings: No
Approx number of graphics: 2804
3D: No
2D: Yes

Fairly extensive collection of some nice graphics for your games. Most of them are free, and there’s some gems in there. They also offer some paid assets, for a low price.

Tags: No
Categories: No
Star ratings: No
Approx number of graphics: 1000
3D: Yes
2D: Yes

Google’s Poly service was set up in late 2017 to provide free low poly models for user, mostly in AR or VR applications.

Poly features tools to upload your own models or remix the models of others.

Tags: No
Categories: Yes
Star ratings: No
Approx number of graphics: 8889
3D: Yes
2D: No

A categorised collection of free, high quality pixel art b y Luis Zuno

Tags: No
Categories: Yes
Star ratings: No
Approx number of graphics: 300
3D: No
2D: Yes

A decent selection of mainly isometric, categorised, 2D and 3D royalty free graphics assets

Tags: No
Categories: Yes
Star ratings: No
Approx number of graphics: 250
3D: Yes
2D: Yes

A simple png of 420 pixel art icons for use in an RPG

Tags: No
Categories: No
Star ratings: No
Approx number of graphics: 420
3D: No
2D: Yes

Game development blogs

A lovely blog for gamers and game makers with lots of technical and creative tutorials, and post mortems from game developer Dan Kenny

Detailed tutorials, analysis and giveaways are available at this handy, frequently updated blog for game developers

A long lived blog for game developers, featuring news, tutorials and in-depth analysis

A popular blog about game design, featuring analysis and reviews

A varied blog about game design, development, and production from an experienced industry game dev turned indie, with a number of iOS titles under his belt. Also includes discussion of the business side.

Detailed, technical articles on the fundamentals of the plumbing of game development, with a focus on networking and physics. From The Network Protocol Company, who appear to be a consultancy for, you guessed it, game networking.

A blog about game design centred around the design of Magic the Gathering, by veteran designer Mark Rosewater. Although not strictly about video game design, the principles explored apply to all flavours of game design.

A blog from veteran game designer Tadhg Kelly, a regular co tribute to gamasutra and Techcrunch. Excellent insights into how to go about thinking about game design.

A popular blog from professional game designer Chris DeLeon. Cred: worked at EA, had impressive success with games for iOS.

Discussion of the theory of game design, and theoretical aspects of development as it relates to their game, Overgrowth.

Great reads on game design, particularly in the strategy space by professional game designer Keith Burgun. Founded his own studio, wrote books on game design.

Comprehensive collection of detailed articles on game design theory and art

SEO tools

SEO audit tools

WooRank is a tool that returns an extremely detailed analysis of your website from many varied angles that influence search engine rank

This ranges from social impact, valid markup, keyword analysis, usability analysis, security and mobile concerns

A very functional interface that clearly indicates any possible problems

Ahrefs is widely renowned, and near-unparalleled. However this quality comes at a steep price. At the core, they allow you to analyze your competitor’s site, learn what factors are effecting their ability to rank on Google, and therefore what you can do to compete.

This is primarily done with backlink analysis, but Ahrefs includes an overall competitor analysis, along with keyword, and content analysis. You can analyse your competitor’s top pages, and even compare their top keywords with the keywords on your own site, to identify gaps in your content.

Ahrefs also includes an advanced keyword research tool, identifying search volumes and cost-per-click.

An all-in-one SEO tool which gives you all the important functionality, with best-in-class data and analysis on a wealth of aspects of your site: organic keyword and pay-per-click advertising research, backlink analysis, and technical optimizations.

SEMrush really shines when you enter a competitor’s domain - you’ll be presented with their best keywords, and performance reports. It also allows you to analyse your competitors’ ad keywords and budgets.

On top of this it provides an advanced site audit tool, a social media tracker and poster, including post scheduling and analysis, brand mention monitoring and more.

Serpstat is a general SEO tool providing position tracking, backlink analysis, competitor research, and a site audit.

The keyword research identifies Google volume, competition, and cost-per-click rates. It also provides analysis on niche questions.

For backlink analysis, Serpstat gives a detailed report on referring domains, backlinks with historical charts, and a quality score or rank.

Serpstat also provides a site audit functionality, identifying errors and recommendations, analysing meta tags, headings, redirects, accessibility, and inbound links. It’s error reports are detailed and instruct you on how to fix them.

The cheapest tier provides a generous amount of data at a price that won’t put you out of business.

This is a tool for local SEO, with Google My Business auditing, review monitoring on recommendation sites like Yelp and Tripadvisor, and citation building and tracking. They also handling submitting your site to business directories and mapping services.

Raven has a suite of tools including site audits, backlink reports, and automated marketing reports. It can pull in data from Google Analytics, AdWords, Search Console, and social ads like Facebook and Twitter.

As a site auditor, it identifies technical issues and metrics like page speed and mobile usability.

Pagelocity is a Web Page Optimization and Performance tool for web developers, designers and web site owners. It provides an in-depth analysis about a web page covering the following: social metrics, on-page SEO, web page resources, HTML/CSS insights and competitive analysis.

Dareboost provides an easy website optimization report, detailing errors and performance metrics. It includes the ability to monitor your site, so you can look back at historical performance, and receive regular reports to your inbox.

Particularly of interest, it allows you to compare your website’s performance with a competitor’s.

SEO keyword tools

Ahrefs is widely renowned, and near-unparalleled. However this quality comes at a steep price. At the core, they allow you to analyze your competitor’s site, learn what factors are effecting their ability to rank on Google, and therefore what you can do to compete.

This is primarily done with backlink analysis, but Ahrefs includes an overall competitor analysis, along with keyword, and content analysis. You can analyse your competitor’s top pages, and even compare their top keywords with the keywords on your own site, to identify gaps in your content.

Ahrefs also includes an advanced keyword research tool, identifying search volumes and cost-per-click.

An all-in-one SEO tool which gives you all the important functionality, with best-in-class data and analysis on a wealth of aspects of your site: organic keyword and pay-per-click advertising research, backlink analysis, and technical optimizations.

SEMrush really shines when you enter a competitor’s domain - you’ll be presented with their best keywords, and performance reports. It also allows you to analyse your competitors’ ad keywords and budgets.

On top of this it provides an advanced site audit tool, a social media tracker and poster, including post scheduling and analysis, brand mention monitoring and more.

KWFinder provides a detailed keyword analysis and report, including historical trends, search volumes, and cost-per-click information. It also analyzes the sites in the search results for authority and other ranking information.

Of particular interest is their long tail keyword analysis which identifies those not targeted by your competitors.

Google’s Keyword Planner would have the most accurate data, one would assume. All the same, they don’t make the full detail available to everyone - the amount of searches isn’t shown as an exact number, but as a broad range, which makes it far less useful.

The tool still provides you with excellent keyword suggestions, allows you to monitor keyword trends, and see how the volumes change over time.

If the name didn’t give it away, SpyFu is a keyword research tool with a focus on analysing your competitors keywords, showing you what keywords your competitors pay for (or rank for organically), the amount of clicks they get, and how much they pay.

It also allows you to monitor your competitors for AdWords campaigns, letting you know when ad spend changes, as well as informing you of competitor’s keywords that you’re not competing on.

One wonders how they come across this data, but they come highly recommended from around the web.

Admirably, SpyFu offers a no-nonsense approach to paying for their services, with low costs and unlimited data and downloads.

This one’s a bit different, it utilizes the auto-complete feature on Google and Bing to identify and track long-tail keywords, with a visualisation breaking up the queries into who/what/where/why/how categories.

Serpstat is a general SEO tool providing position tracking, backlink analysis, competitor research, and a site audit.

The keyword research identifies Google volume, competition, and cost-per-click rates. It also provides analysis on niche questions.

For backlink analysis, Serpstat gives a detailed report on referring domains, backlinks with historical charts, and a quality score or rank.

Serpstat also provides a site audit functionality, identifying errors and recommendations, analysing meta tags, headings, redirects, accessibility, and inbound links. It’s error reports are detailed and instruct you on how to fix them.

The cheapest tier provides a generous amount of data at a price that won’t put you out of business.

An incredible tool in the form of a browser extension which adds search volume, cost-per-click, and keyword competition data to a variety of websites, like Google, Google Trends, Answer The Public, Google Keyword Planner, and more.

This is more powerful than it might seem - it’s a great time saver that allows you to see the keyword analysis without switching between your tools, and for free.

Ubersuggest is a keyword research tool by well known industry man, Neil Patel.

Based on your input, it provides keyword suggestions, estimations of search volume, CPC rates, and keyword competition in both paid and organic contexts.

Best of all, this information is provided for free.

This tool provides a detailed information on keywords, and shockingly, provides a decent amount of information for free.

It includes search volumes on Google as well as Bing/Yahoo, cost-per-click and monthly value information for advertising. It also includes the same data for UK search.