~3 minute read

Collecting resources is a special hobby of mine, I'll admit it.

More than anything, I think finding and saving others' neat works for later is my greatest strength. I don't necessarily have the skills to make a new thing, but I sure as heck can find one that someone else made and listed as CC0. My "Resources" and "Game Assets" bookmark folders are too big to even list. I follow lots of public domain and creative commons oriented websites - specifically on their email lists and RSS feeds. (The reason this process post is later than I intended is because I've been in tech for a show I was sound designing, and a lot of those sounds came from freesound.org which is simply invaluable.) Learning what the various licenses mean and what you have to do for that license is essential.  Let's talk about Quackerton specifically.

These were the primary sites used for Quackerton's art:

The British Library on Flickr Basically everything listed here is public domain since it is so old.

OpenGameArt.org This site feels like it hasn't changed in 15 years and I absolutely love it for that. There's a very active community there to this day and I like that their search bar lets you get very specific.

rawpixel, specifically their public domain collection, as curated by the Public Domain Review (I didn't use it for this project, but the Public Domain Review also has a flickr page) This gave me some very high quality art photos, which was wonderful for getting the more formal and sophisticated look I wanted to go for.

Honorable mention: Lemma Soft Forums I go here when I need any help for Ren'Py. More often than not, someone has had my exact problem and six people have explained step by step how to do it. It's so helpful for making anything in Ren'Py.

The most important part of using any of these sites is checking the license.

Many free works are creative commons, BUT do not allow you to charge any money for what you make. The Free Music Archive is pretty stellar for letting you search based on license type. All license details are listed on the Creative Commons site, and most websites should link you to that if they have a CC0 or CC BY-SA 4.0 or any other license listed on the work. (You can even spot them on bandcamp albums. There are many artists such as Patricia Taxxon who list their work as free to use with credit.) Plus, like, even if you don't have to credit someone... why not? You're an artist making cool things, they're an artist making cool things, why not spread the love?

Fun fact: Creative Commons has no official relationship with the US copyright office! Of course they are aware of them, but there's nothing official between the two. (I took a workshop with a copyright office official not too long ago and that fact blew my mind. Creative Commons is functionally just a bunch of people promising to be cool! How cool is that!!)

Where do you find your creative commons and public domain art?

I want to add them to my huge bookmark folders (•́⌄•́๑)૭✧

In my next two posts, I plan to talk about how I developed Quackerton's style and visual design, and talk about what I did not accomplish before the deadline. I hope you'll stick around for that!