Last Friday afternoon, I put forth a challenge to my readership (did either of you read that post?) to grab a copy of Game Maker and make a game with it over the weekend.

I did my part and sat down several times over the weekend to put together something. My plan was to see how quickly/easily I could put together a Zelda clone. I spent the majority of the time not making a game.

Similar to the trials of real game developers, the real work was in generating all of those assets one needs for making a game. Sure, there are tons of video game sprite resources out there. The problem is that the sprites are rarely complete, usable sets. You’ll find plenty of characters, particularly single frames, but very little in the way of background tiles. Of course, background tiles can often be the easiest to create, but the attempt was a bit frustrating.

When it comes to code, I can trivially find a huge wealth of freely available resources. And these are not “ripped” code snippets from commercial games, they are honest-to-god free software that I can directly leverage. Finding something like that in the art world, particularly in the world of sprites, is very, very rare. In fact, I couldn’t find a single complete set of animated characters and background tiles. (There is Reiner’s isometric graphics, but I’m looking more for that 8-bit/16-bit aesthetic, not the Diablo-esque aesthetic that he produced with a 3D package.)

Does the “open source” vibe not afflict the budding pixel artists out there in the same way that it afflicts many programmers? Or is just a lack of pixel artists? I’ve not exactly seen an overwhelming amount of free 3D art, other than some of the repositories of Quake III avatars, etc.

Any pixel artists out there who may be able to point me at a good resource? Any designers care to share their secrets for attaining artwork? Do I need to just bite the bullet and spend some time in Photoshop?