Free Game Dev Assets

Free assets and tools for commercial games, with every licence read at its source.

Browse 392 sources · Starter stacks · Choose by job · Licences · Contribute

Each entry records the licence as its source states it and the date someone read it there; active entries quote the source's own words. The catalog indexes sources and never rehosts them: check the source before you ship.

Big lists such as magictools and awesome-gamedev tell you something is free. This one tells you what the licence says, where it says it, and when it was last read, so you don't have to re-check forty tabs before a release. (Thanks to magictools: many tool entries started from its list.)

Note

This is the catalog's reading of each licence, not legal advice. Licences change: read the source's own terms before you ship.

Pick by the job → Guides that compare sources which look interchangeable and are not.

Start from a stack → One pick per need for a kind of game, and what the whole set owes.

Check before you ship → When each licence was last read at its source, oldest first.

Recent: 2026-10-04, 15 more video, animation and environment sources. 2026-09-30, 42 more sources, mostly pipeline, pixel-art and chiptune tools. 2026-09-25, starter stacks and a licence freshness page.

Contents

Start here · Starter stacks · Browse the catalog · Reading an entry · Safe starting points · Licences · Godot · How the catalog stays honest · Scope · Contributing · Support

A few of the sources

The publishers most projects start from.

Kenney CC0 · modular 3D	Quaternius CC0 · rigged kits	KayKit CC0 · atlas characters	Poly Haven CC0 · HDRI and PBR
Kenney UI CC0 · HUD and menus	Input prompts CC0 · 64×64 glyphs	ambientCG CC0 · seamless PBR	Departure Mono SIL OFL · pixel type

_{Publisher promotional stills (CC0 or SIL OFL), shown here as documentation only. The packs themselves stay on the source sites.}

Start here

Choose by the job, not by the licence. Most sources in a category share a licence, so the licence column rarely tells you which one to pick. These guides compare sources that look interchangeable and are not. Several are measured from the files themselves, not the store pages.

You are choosing	Guide
A pixel tileset, by grid size and projection	2D: Choosing a pixel tileset
An icon set, and which two carry obligations	2D: Choosing an icon set
Kenney, KayKit or Quaternius	3D: measured comparison of scale, triangles and rigs
A PBR texture library you can redistribute	3D: Choosing a PBR texture source
A rigged character, and whether its animations will transfer	Characters: Choosing a rigged character source
A pixel font, including CJK	Fonts: Choosing a pixel font
Game music, and whether videos of your game will get claimed	Audio: Choosing game music
Sound effects, and what "no credit" still leaves you owing	Audio: Choosing sound effects
A Godot 4 add-on that still builds against your engine	Tools: Godot 4 add-ons
Between two tools that do the same job	Tools: near-duplicates

Need something working today? Take the safe starting points: the catalog's highest-confidence sources, with the licence shown so you can see which ones owe a credit.

Starter stacks

One pick per need for a kind of game, with a summary of what the whole set owes. Each stack is a page on the site.

Make a…	What you get
2D pixel platformer	A side-scrolling pixel-art platformer you intend to sell
2D top-down pixel game	An adventure or RPG with menus, controller prompts and a terminal-style font
3D low-poly arena in Godot	Rigged, animated characters and impact sounds, built in Godot 4
First-person destruction	Debris materials, industrial props and ambience for a game about breaking things
Mobile puzzle	A casual match-3 or board-style game for phones

Browse the catalog

The website searches all 392 entries and filters them by category, commercial use, attribution, review status and 2D camera view. Press / to search. Filtered views and individual entries have their own URLs, so you can send someone exactly what you are looking at.

Category	Entries	Focus	Index
3D	72	Models, scans, PBR textures and materials	catalog/3d/
Tools	109	Editors, pipeline, TTS, Godot add-ons	catalog/tools/
2D	58	Sprites, tilesets, UI and HUD, icons, palettes	catalog/2d/
Audio	34	SFX, music, foley, impulse responses	catalog/audio/
Characters	28	Rigged packs, generators, modular humanoids	catalog/characters/
Fonts	25	OFL and commercial-ok typefaces, CJK	catalog/fonts/
Environment	18	HDRI, terrain DEMs, geodata	catalog/environment/
Shaders & VFX	18	Shaders, particle and FX resources	catalog/shaders-vfx/
Animation	17	Motion capture and character clips	catalog/animation/
Video	13	Stock footage, archival clips	catalog/video/

Reading an entry

Each source is one Markdown file: frontmatter for the facts, then notes on what it is good for, what the catch is, and a dated Evidence section quoting the live licence page.

Status	Meaning	What to do
🟢 active	Licence read at the source and quoted with a date	Suitable to evaluate for production
🟡 needs-review	Useful, but a real question is still open, and the entry says which	Verify before shipping
⚪ deprecated	Kept for history, with the reason stated	Use an alternative

verified is the date someone last read the licence at the source. The website shows its age on every row and marks it once it passes a year; at that point, re-read the licence yourself before you rely on it.

Aggregators (OpenGameArt, Poly Pizza, itch collections, font indexes) are usually license: varies. The licence belongs to each file, not to the site or even to the author, so review every file you take.

Frontmatter fields

Field	Meaning
license	Licence as the source states it, from a closed vocabulary in site/license-vocabulary.json (CC0, CC-BY-4.0, SIL OFL, GPL-3.0-or-later, custom, varies, and so on)
license_spdx	The SPDX identifier, whenever the licence maps to exactly one. Absent when there is no single identifier: custom, varies, unknown, public domain, unversioned CC-BY, and GPL values that do not say -only or -or-later
commercial	true, false, unknown or varies. varies means per-file review; the site's Commercial OK filter still lists these, labelled per-file review
attribution_required	true, false or unknown. For fonts, false means no credit line, not no obligation: see docs/fonts.md
attribution_string	Copy-paste credit line, present when attribution is required
formats	Common download and interchange formats
verified	Date the licence was last read at the source (YYYY-MM-DD)
status	See the table above
publisher	The rights holder, when it has more than one entry. Never a generic host
grid_dimensions, camera_perspective, hardware_tags	Optional 2D metadata: tile size, projection (top_down, isometric_3_4, side_scroller, 2d_flat), input-device coverage

Add a new source from catalog/TEMPLATE.md. id must be unique across the whole catalog.

Safe starting points

High-signal sources that cover most early production needs. This mirrors the starter list on the website, which is set in site/config.json; if the two ever disagree, the config is the one the site uses.

All 19 starters

Need	Source	Licence
Modular low-poly 3D / UI	Kenney	CC0
Rigged low-poly characters	Quaternius	CC0
Atlas-optimized kits	KayKit (Kay Lousberg)	CC0
Seamless PBR materials	ambientCG	CC0
HDRIs / calibrated env	Poly Haven	CC0
Second CC0 HDRI publisher	Open HDRI	CC0
Extra PBR + SBSAR	TextureCan	CC0
UI icons (brand-free)	Lucide Icons	ISC
Hand-drawn 2D vectors	Glitch (CC0 asset release)	CC0
Input prompts (Deck / Switch 2 / Quest)	Kenney Input Prompts	CC0
Pro SFX dumps	Sonniss #GameAudioGDC Bundle	custom
Attribution music	Incompetech (Kevin MacLeod)	CC-BY-4.0
Pixel / terminal font	Departure Mono	SIL OFL
Localization fonts	Noto Sans (incl. CJK)	SIL OFL
No-attribution music stingers	Kenney Music Jingles	CC0
No-attribution music loops	Abstraction Music Loop Bundle	CC0
Generate your own retro SFX	jsfxr	Unlicense
Extra CC0 PBR (photoscans)	cgbookcase	CC0
CC0 16-bit platformer kit	SunnyLand (ansimuz)	CC0

Licences

Read these before you mix packs into a commercial build.

Guide	Covers
docs/licenses.md	The cheat sheet: what each licence allows and owes
docs/fonts.md	Embedding versus redistribution, and what an OFL font still owes
docs/geodata.md	Attribution across DEM, map and satellite sources, and why ODbL does not reach your game
docs/game-vs-video-licensing.md	Why "commercial use" on a video licence may not cover a game
docs/provenance.md	Judging a supplier, and keeping a paper trail
docs/high-risk.md	Sources to avoid entirely
docs/ai-assets.md	AI-generated assets
docs/fivem.md	GTA-format and FiveM assets
docs/trust-score.md	Review rubric used when vetting a source (not shown on entries)

The short version

Licence	In a closed-source game
CC0	The safest default. Nothing owed
CC-BY	Commercial use is fine; credit the author. CC-BY-3.0 sources often want the author named; CC-BY-4.0 is usually met by a credits-screen line
CC-BY-SA	Usable commercially, but share-alike applies to derivatives of the asset. Ship SA files in extractable bundles rather than encrypting them into the binary
Any ND licence	Generally unusable in games, because interactive sync and remix count as derivatives
SIL OFL	The default for fonts in games. No credit line, but the licence file ships with the font
ODbL (OpenStreetMap)	A game that renders map data is a produced work, so the share-alike does not reach it. Credit OSM. Redistributing the data itself is what triggers the obligations
Marketplace "free" (Unity, Fab, Unreal)	Often commercial in-engine only, with no redistribution, and sometimes locked to one engine
Aggregators	The licence is per file, not per author. The same creator's uploads can differ
Trusting the supplier	Skip anonymous mega-dumps and known traps (MB-Lab, default Shadertoy, map scrapes, GTA and FiveM rips)

Catalog metadata in this repository is CC0. Linked assets keep their own licences.

Godot

A research-backed shortlist for Godot 4 projects is in docs/godot-budget-stack.md. Before adopting an add-on, check its row in the maintenance table. Some add-ons' latest release is years older than their maintained branch, one is alpha, and one is a Godot 3 runtime listed beside the Godot 4 ones.

How the catalog stays honest

A catalog like this is only useful if you can trust it, and trust has to be checked, not asserted. So node site/validate.mjs runs on every push and fails the build rather than publishing a broken catalog. Among other things, it checks that:

• a verified date is never newer than the newest date in the entry's own Evidence, so a date cannot be bumped without a fresh quote to back it
• every license value comes from the documented vocabulary, and its SPDX identifier agrees with it
• an attribution licence marked "no attribution" states the publisher's waiver
• category indexes, counts and the badge above match the catalog
• no third-party binaries are committed to the repository

The checks themselves are tested against known-bad fixtures in site/checks.test.mjs. Every review pass, and every correction it made, is recorded in docs/review-ledger.md.

Scope

In scope	Out of scope
Free asset libraries, packs and aggregators with a clear free tier	Rehosting or mirroring third-party archives, models or audio
Tools for creating or processing game assets	Paid-only marketplaces with no meaningful free content
Sources usable in commercial games when their terms allow	Guessing licences

When a source does not say plainly, the entry says unknown and needs-review instead.

Contributing

New sources, licence corrections, dead links and clearer notes are all welcome.

1. Start an entry with npm run new-entry -- <category> <id>. It copies the template, sets the id and date, and starts the entry as needs-review.
2. Read the licence at the source and quote it, with the date, in the entry's Evidence section.
3. Add a row for it to the category's README.md, then run npm run counts to update every count.
4. Run npm test && npm run validate (quick), then open a pull request. CI also runs the full build.

CONTRIBUTING.md has the full checklist and how to verify a licence. Please follow the Code of Conduct.

Run the checks and preview the site locally

Node 22 or newer; there is nothing to install.

npm run check    # all of the below, in the order CI runs them
npm test         # the checks against known-bad fixtures, and the site modules' tests
npm run validate # the catalog, against the checks (node site/validate.mjs)
npm run build    # builds the site into site/dist (node site/build.mjs)
npm run serve    # preview at http://localhost:3000

Repository layout

.
├── README.md
├── CONTRIBUTING.md             how to add and verify an entry
├── LICENSE                     CC0-1.0 for catalog metadata and docs
├── catalog/
│   ├── README.md               master index
│   ├── TEMPLATE.md             copy this to add a source
│   └── 3d/ 2d/ audio/ characters/ environment/
│       fonts/ shaders-vfx/ animation/ video/ tools/
│                               one .md per source, plus a README index
├── docs/
│   ├── licenses.md fonts.md geodata.md game-vs-video-licensing.md
│   ├── provenance.md high-risk.md ai-assets.md fivem.md trust-score.md
│   ├── godot-budget-stack.md
│   ├── research-index.md       maintainer notes on local research drafts
│   ├── design/                 design specs behind the entry pages, stacks and freshness page
│   ├── review-ledger.md        every review pass and what it changed
│   └── images/readme/          publisher stills used in this README
├── stacks/                     starter stacks: one pick per need for a kind of game
├── site/
│   ├── validate.mjs            catalog integrity checks
│   ├── checks.mjs              the checks, as pure functions
│   ├── checks.test.mjs         fixtures proving each check fails on bad input
│   ├── new-entry.mjs           starts an entry from the template
│   ├── sync-counts.mjs         rewrites every restated entry count
│   ├── license-vocabulary.json the licence values the catalog accepts
│   ├── spdx-allowed.json       SPDX identifiers in use
│   ├── build.mjs config.json   static site generator and its settings
│   ├── lib/                    page renderers and shared helpers, with lib.test.mjs
│   └── public/                 page, styles and script
├── package.json                npm scripts only; no dependencies
└── RESEARCH/README.md          research archive index (drafts are gitignored)

Support

If the catalog saves you time, you can sponsor TMHSDigital on GitHub. Entirely optional.

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License

Catalog metadata and documentation in this repository are dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0 Universal. Third-party assets linked from the catalog remain under their original licences. Verify terms on the source site before use.