Sunday, February 26, 2006

250 free handdrawn textures

I was searching through my old archives and came across a set of 250 textures that I thought were long lost. Heck, they aren't doing much good sitting on a slowly decaying CD-R so I figured I'd share them with everyone.

Click here to download CircleTextures.zip (4.49 MB)

Use these however you desire. Mash them up, put them in your games. If you end up releasing a game using these graphics to the public, all I ask is that you put a link to this website someplace the nether depths of your credits.

They are a few years old, so they are all 128 x 128 images using a common fixed 8-bit palette. I also included a text file that explains the naming convention.

If any of you are new to graphics tiles, here's a little illustration that explains all the parts. You have a set of 14 titles that can be used to make any irregular shape and smoothly transition between two titles. For example. Suppose you had a water title and a land title. With the transition titles, you could easily create a pretty shore line.


Tile creation is a dying art since modern 3D terrain engines have all sorts of wonderful blending capabilities for auto generating transition tiles. But if you are working on a game for handhelds or casual games, it is a nice technique to know.

Enjoy!
Danc.

PS: Here's another picture I found! This is the Colossi, a giant floating airwhale that was genetically engineered to serve as the mothership of a parasitic race of super spies known as Puppeteers.



30 comments:

  1. wow, very nice work! this is very generous of you.

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  2. Beautiful. What were these for originally?

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  3. These were originally for a 3D rpg called The Circle, which was being developed in parallel to the first Unreal using the then unreleased Unreal engine.

    Enter your typical tale of woe...inexperienced development team, unstable technology platform that was delayed by 2 years, and an overly ambitious design. The title was canceled, Unreal was finally released a while later and the rest, as they say is history. :-)

    There are lots of such projects out there. These orphaned projects have impressive art resources, some nifty code and great concept art. Yet they are buried for all enternity. It seems to be a sad fate for resources that could have been quite useful to someone someplace.

    take care
    Danc.

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  4. Brilliant artwork mate, a much appreciated gift. :)

    Just a wee observation: you can drop about 1 meg from the zip if you get rid of the thumbnail file inside it. Doesn't bother me as I'm on broadband but just one for those still on the tin can and bit of string connections.

    Thanks a lot.

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  5. Thank you *hug, being a poor student mashing away at opengl (both sence of the word), i need textures!

    <3

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  6. I would have loved to have seen this project finished. I did think at the time that your story was a bit too influenced by the Dark Crystal. But then, folks really never did understand it, remember when you had to try to explain it to Epic? Hahahah... I don't think they ever did get it... oh wait, maybe that was me that never got it. :)

    --Ray

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  7. The quality of a tiled terrain with proper textures will never be duplicated by 3d engines.
    Thank you for this artwork. When my title gets finished I'll include your name in the credits (and if I don't please tell me inmediatly so I can do it).

    Thank you very much!
    Guimo

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  8. really nice work, thanks for sharing it, really

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  9. Great artwork! Thanks for sharing.

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  10. Am I the only person who thinks the Colossi looks like a gigantic hovering phallus?

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  11. rahul!? You pervert!

    I would never admit to seeing that!

    (though I think Danc and I once had that discussion... waaaaay back... :) )

    --Ray

    PS> Danc, I still think it would make a great story.

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  12. Hola!

    Ray is the purest of the snowey white angels in my life. As long as he is comfortable with my drawings of football field sized, tentacle dripping, penis whales, I feel comfortably in the moral clear.

    Loved the Circle story. It had a fun 'hard fantasy' take that reminded me of the Hard Scifi, but with a magical bent. Lots of magic, but no elves to be seen anywhere. Some of the Japanese manga falls into the same genre with its mixture of spirituality, epic magic and truely bizarre characters.

    I should send you my design notes, Ray, and after your trilogy is done maybe you could mine its carcass for an interesting short story.

    (Still can't wait to read your next book. It is cruel to give a fellow just one book.)

    -Danc.

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  13. I wub you too Danc. ;)

    Doesn't Ringworld have a puppeteer race? They're also skittish and aloof, as I recall.

    --Ray

    PS> I have already been influenced by a certain component of the Circle. In fact the story I'm currently doing has a very subtle tie to it. Though you'd probably never identify it. One day I hope to have more time to develop the characters and make a story around it...

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  14. Hey, nice tiles! You need more whuffie! ;)

    I'm working on a Palm Pilot/PocketPC RPG under the GPL, and have been looking around for some good tilesets; these will be very helpful.

    Big thanks! I'm assuming these are in the public domain?

    -- MichaelB

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  15. This is incredibly generous of you, Danc. I've taken the liberty of mentioning this post in my game programming challenge at http://www.pyweek.org/2/

    I'm really hoping that the theme for the challenge is amenable to using your tiles. They're just so damned pretty.

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  16. Hi Danc!

    Thank you for the great graphics that you provide for free. I just have your opposite problem: If I'm not wrong, you are a graphic and can't program a line, instead I'm a programmer and can't draw a line :) so your images are very useful to me.

    I have developed a demo of a small shoot'em up prototype in 3D and I have used a sub-set of your "circle" textures for the ground: http://apocalyx.sourceforge.net/demos.php#dragonsride

    Then, in the next days, I'm planning to do some 2D game programming and I find your "Cute" tiles very useful. If I'll succeed to set-up some simple game using them, I'll inform you.

    Thank you again for your work!

    --
    Ciao, leo
    APOCALYX 3D Engine
    http://apocalyx.sf.net

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  17. Hi, I really like these and might be using them in my own attempt to make a game. I was wondering about something though, in the two batch files included in the archive, what is this "alchemy" program?

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  18. These are wonderful, absolutely beautiful. They are a perfect match for the way I'd like to use them.
    I want to use them on the open source game BZFlag (bzflag.org). Unfortunately your instructions to "Use these however you desire." is not sufficient for BZFlag. It's a little vague. Legally, you can not be attributed in bzflag source, without the textures being released under some kind of "official" licence. Just about any open-source license will do. Perhaps creative commons or CC-no-mod would suit this usage?
    Thankyou in advance, if you can see fit to apply a licence to these textures.

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  19. dammm... where does our imagination come in? =\

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  20. Freud would make a feast out of that last image.

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  21. Wow, these are amazing. I am using them in a 2D Final Fantasy type RPG my team is making, we're rendering the all of the maps, landscape, and towns beforehand in Blender, and this is absolutely perfect. Thank you thank you.

    As mentioned above, I urge you to please take 3 minutes and release this beautiful artwork under the Creative Commons or BSD or GPL License. This will LEGALLY freely allow people to use your work as long as they give you credit, which is actually a requirement for some software, as mentioned above.

    For instance we want to release this game on a Linux livecd, which might not technically be legal because of complicated licensing things, unless you license this art.

    If you go here:

    http://creativecommons.org/license/

    there's a tiny little mini-form you fill out about what type of work it is and what legal provisions you want people to have, you click a button, and it gives you a little html tag to put on your page, puts your work into their HUGE search engine which ALOT of people go to to find game resources, and bam, it's licenced. Super easy. =)

    Beautiful work, thank you.

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  22. One thing i can say is... i wish i would've stumbled upon these for my 3d gaming project i had to make. I was trying to make a 3d maze level. And these would've been excellent for the floor textures and maybe even the walls. Simply amazing work. Your artistic style is amazing.

    I just wish i had some sort of project right now where i could use textures. Wait! I know i could use them but not in a 3d way i could use them in a 2d stile sorta like tiles. Haza! you've helped me again. Simply amazing

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  23. hi danc,

    i just wanted to let you know that i made "something" from your textures. i love them and think that i now have found something where they help a lot.

    hopefully i did the license right - you can find your name in the credits at the bottom of the games start page.

    http://mogu.gameprogramming.de

    thanks a lot,
    daniel / sirleto

    http://www.gameprogramming.de/renkel

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  24. I just want to point out, that those 'free' tilesets are pretty useless without declaring a license(e.g. creative commons).
    Also the tileset format could be better. No tileengine I know supports your format and even after editing it is pretty hard to use those in any common tileset engine.

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  25. There is a CC License for these tiles. See: http://lostgarden.com/labels/License.html

    These tiles were created over a decade ago when most of the tileset engine writers weren't even conceived. :-) Feel free to convert them into any format you desire. This is the joy of the free stuff.

    take care,
    Danc.

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  26. Kind of an old post, but I really need to ask something.

    These are great, and I'm feeling a bit dumb for asking, but: should I tile these together in one file? I mean, loading a texture per tile seems a bit excessive...

    If I do need to tile them into one file, how should I go about doing that?

    Thanks.

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  27. Hi,
    thanks very much for these tiles. Should I eventually
    find my game is out there, I will definitely provide
    full attribution - so grateful....

    I used TexturePacker
    to import all the tiles into a tilesheet. Then I used Tiled to create my map. Because the tiles are 128x128 I was able to scale them down to 64x64 for my game assets and leave the 128x128 original for the HD component.
    TexturePacker is an OSX App, but there are probably windows version as well.....

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  28. Hi, thank you really much for these AWESOME tiles! (I nearly never use the word awesome ;D)
    I'm going to create a HTML5-Canvas-based game with it...
    As soon as it's in beta, i'll post a link to it.
    A big ThumbsUp and again thank you!

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  29. They are beautiful. Thx.
    I have used some to make my HTML5 game border.
    I also use your collection of "Art Collection Title"
    My game is still in development, but you can see what i have here:

    http://jads.itsimples.pt/

    For now there is only one Portuguese version.
    When my game gets finished I'll include your name in the credits

    Thanks one more time. ( Obrigado :) )

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