Game developer resources
For coders, one of the most difficult aspects of creating a game is finding the graphics and sound resources needed to bring a game to life. If you can’t pay someone to produce resources for you, you’ll have to either find someone willing to work with you for free, buy them pre-made, or find free resources.
Your first step should be to check out if what you want has already been made - whether it’s available for free or at a price. If, for example, you’re making a space shooter, you’ll be in luck as there’s plenty of free space ship, laser-like, and explosion graphics and sound around. Check out the list of resources below for sites that stock free and paid graphics and sound. There’s a good chance you’ll be satisfied with what’s already out there.
If you can’t find anything out there, or if you’re particular with what your game needs to be just right, paying someone to create exactly what you need is the best option - assuming you’ve got the cash. This way you get exactly what you’re after and won’t have to compromise your vision.
If you’re strapped for cash but can’t use something off the shelf, but you have skilled graphic designer or artist friends, you might be in luck. Ask around. Otherwise, hit up game developer forums and see if you can sway a friendly internet person to help you out. There’s plenty of enthusiasts who might buy into your vision and be happy to work with you for free.
Get started by checking out the many sites providing graphics and sound below.
Also check out this curated list of free unity assets.
Sound effects resources
An open community database of sfx, mfx and gfx. Aimed at the indie devs. Quality varies.
Open source, huge database. Good community feel.
A fairly large database of free, good quality sound effects, for use in your games or videos.
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.
Over a million sound effects, on a site that claims to have been around since 1997. Approximately $3 per sound effect.
Professionally designed game sound effects at very affordable prices.
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.
Large collection of royalty free sounds and music.
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
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.
Medium sized set of sounds presented with a moderately usable interface
A large database of sound effects, organised into categories, with tags. Prices from $1, up to around $5.
Music resources
An open community database of sfx, mfx and gfx. Aimed at the indie devs. Quality varies.
Good commercial music, good price. Fairly large rap beats focus - but most suit any purpose. Typically high tempo.
Great interface for good quality music. Large database.
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.
A decent collection of creative commons licensed music for podcasts, videos, games and so on.
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.
A huge collection of music and loops, including creative commons licensed
A great modern site for a large collection of music tracks at fairly low prices
Nice set of $5 music tracks
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.
Large collection of royalty free sounds and music.
Graphics resources
Some great graphics here, including the tileset for Tyrian, freely available.
An open community database of sfx, mfx and gfx. Aimed at the indie devs. Quality varies.
Excellent 3D model packs, A couple of packs is typically enough for a pro 3D game.
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.
A great collection of vector graphics ideal for indie computer game design and development
A large, modern marketplace for Blender files. Many are creative commons licensed.
A site that specialises in icons for your game’s UI
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.
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.
A categorised collection of free, high quality pixel art b y Luis Zuno
A decent selection of mainly isometric, categorised, 2D and 3D royalty free graphics assets
A simple png of 420 pixel art icons for use in an RPG
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