Topic: OpenGameArt has a lot of art and backgrounds and sounds and more

[Software Santa]

OpenGameArt has a lot of art and backgrounds and sounds and more for game designers!

What's the purpose of this site?

If you've ever browsed Free/Open Source game sites (such as The Linux Game Tome, you'll notice that a fairly significant number of the games available suffer from what's lovingly referred to as 'programmer art'. There are, of course, some notable exceptions to this, but it's clear that, for an open source game to produce good art, it has to become large and popular enough to attract artists.

Unfortunately, many fun and well-designed games never reach this point and are thus stuck with placeholder art, which ultimately detracts from their appeal and popularity. Furthermore, it's not unheard of for open source projects to rip their placeholder art from commercial games, which is illegal and could conceivably result in a lawsuit.

The purpose of this site is to provide a solid (and hopefully ever-expanding) variety of high quality, freely licensed art, so that free/open source game developers can use it in their games.

Aren't there other sites out there like this?

Yes and no.

There are plenty of other sites out there, but they aren't necessarily conducive to finding good game art that can be used legally in open source games. To be a good source for this kind of content, a site should be:

Human-edited for quality
Clear about licensing, so that you're sure any art on the site can legally be used in a Free/Open Source game or other program
Have firm ground rules about what can be submitted
Some art sites serve as places where artists can post their work and get critiques. While some of these artists are willing to license their work out in a way that's compatible with free/open source software, it can be very difficult to find art that's appropriately licensed.

Other sites provide sprites for use, but they allow people to contribute sprites that have been "ripped" from games, and are therefore in violation of copyright.

Finally, it should be noted that Free Art Search provides a massive index of a lot of art that already exists in Free/Open Source projects and is a great place to go if you're searching for open art.

http://opengameart.org