Open Game Art is a media repository intended for use with free and open source software video game projects, offering open content assets. Its purpose is to allow developers to easily replace programmer art with high-quality, freely licensed artwork. It accepts both 2D and 3D art, as well as sound effects and music, unlike similar projects such as ccMixter, which only deals with audio samples and songs, and

The Freesound Project Freesound is a collaborative repository of Creative Commons licensed audio samples, and non-profit organisation, with more than 500,000 sounds and effects (as of May 2021), and 8 million registered users (as of March 2019). Sounds are uploaded ...

, which limits itself solely to samples.

Content licensing

All content found on Open Game Art is licensed under free licenses. The project does not accept content licensed with clauses which prevent commercial reuse or remixing (like the Creative Commons license clauses NC or ND), as these are perceived to restrict users, thus making the content non-free. The acceptable licenses currently are: the

Creative Commons licenses A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyrics ...

" CC BY-SA 3.0" and "

CC BY A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyrics ...

3.0", the license "OGA-BY 3.0", which is based on the "CC BY 3.0" license but removing that license's technical restrictions (i.e. anti- DRM restrictions), the GNU licenses " GPLv2/GPLv3/

LGPL The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

v2/LGPLv3" and the

Public domain like license Public-domain-equivalent license are licenses that grant public-domain-like rights and/or act as waivers. They are used to make copyrighted works usable by anyone without conditions, while avoiding the complexities of attribution or license comp ...

" CC0". The latter is functionally equivalent to releasing content into the public domain, relinquishing as many rights as possible. Content under other highly permissive licenses such as the WTFPL or public domain-like licenses, should be relicensed as CC0 before being uploaded according to the site's FAQ. The website also allows co-licensing, that is, the uploading of assets under more than one license, similarly to Wikimedia Commons.

Content

Being a repository for free content, much of the site's content is often created using free software such as

GIMP GIMP ( ; GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image manipulation (retouching) and image editing, free-form drawing, transcoding between different image file formats, and more specialized task ...

, Inkscape, and in particular, Blender. Artists from the

Warzone 2100 ''Warzone 2100'' is an Open-source video game, open-source real-time strategy and real-time tactics hybrid PC game, computer game, originally developed by Pumpkin Studios and published by Eidos Interactive. It was originally released in 1999 fo ...

, The Battle for Wesnoth and Frogatto projects, amongst others, have contributed assets. The site also has a section for articles and tutorials, as well as a discussion forum for its users.

Operation

Hosting costs are currently paid for by the site operator. Donations are accepted through a PayPal account, and are used entirely to commission new artwork, with users being able to make requests as to what kind of artwork is commissioned. From June to July 2009, a pixel art contest was run to create clothes, hair and accessories for a pair of humanoid sprites that had been commissioned exclusively for Open Game Art. This subsequently evolved into the Liberated Pixel Cup (LPC), a project to create a unified set of Creative Commons artwork. To stimulate new artistic contributions, the site also hosts an informal weekly competition called the ''Friday Challenge'', wherein an artistic theme will be announced on a Friday, and entries will be voted on until a winner is decided nine days later. OpenGameArt.org is also affiliated with related websites such as Libregamewiki, a database of purely libre games, the Free Gamer blog and the FreeGameDev forums.

References

External links

Open Game Art Homepage
{{Creative Commons topic Creative Commons Creative Commons-licensed websites Internet properties established in 2009 Open content projects Open-source video games