[MUSIC] As part of this deliverable, as part of this eight weeks sequence of deliverables, one of the things that we're asking you to do is go out and to find some assets, either create them yourself or to collect them from the Internet. But we want to give you some guidance on how to go about doing that. So for starters, when I'm talking about assets, what I'm talking about is I'm talking about those images, those animated images, those sounds, primarily that are incorporated into your game. Of course, if you do a game you've got to have something like that. And so, do we expect students to be artists as well? Well, no, we don't expect you to be an artist. But if you are, that's great. You can do your own art for your game and really give it a very unique, customized and stylized presentation that comes from your imagination and your skill. Now, most of us are not both good coders and good artists and good animators all at once. And so, sometimes it's helpful to either have a team of people you're working with or to leverage some resources that are available to us. And in this case, on the Internet. Because fun games need fun assets as well. So, again, when I talk about assets I mean not the game so much but the images, the animations, the music, and the sounds that are associated with the game that you're playing. Now, one of the challenges with going out to the Internet and just grabbing anything you want is that these sounds, these images, these are also exactly the kind of things that protected by copyright. So it's not okay to just go take someone else's creative work and to use it in your game without any concern about who created it or the rights that you have in order to use it. So it's important to pay attention to that. Here are some resources, though, that you have at your disposal to find some kind of assets that you'd like to work with that are possibly available through licenses that are flexible enough to do this kind of work. There are several places on the Internet where these game assets can be found, and they are covered with licenses that basically enable them to be freely used. But you do have to check exactly what the copyright enables, and here are the kind of things that you're looking for. You're looking for whether or not the copyright enables you to just use it without paying for it. That's the first thing. Secondly, sometimes the copyright will allow you to use it for things that are non-commercial but not for things that are commercial. So, if you're planning on selling your game, you have to make sure that you have the rights to use it for commercial uses. Another thing that they might require is that you attribute where or who you got the material from. So in that case, what you could do is you could have a page in your game that lists all the different assets in your game and where you got them from in order to meet the requirement of the license from which which you're getting these assets. That's a completely reasonable thing to do, is to put a thank you page for these people who provided assets for the game. Another thing you might be looking for is whether or not an asset requires you to share and share alike. And what that means is that sometimes the license around graphic or sound says sure, you can use my graphics or sound, you can use it for free. Maybe for commercial reasons, maybe for non-commercial reasons. But if you decide to use it, you also have to share whatever you make in the same way. And what that means is that you have to make your game available to anyone who wants to use it as well. Sometimes people aren't comfortable with that. But these are the kinds of things that you have to pay attention to when you work with your licenses. All right. So let me give you a little creative warning as well. Before you go out to any of these different sites looking for assets, I really encourage you to think through what kind of game you want to make, almost to the level of what do you want the aesthetic to look like. What do you want the game to look like? Is it cartoony? Is it science fictiony? Is it more on the horror side? Or maybe it's realistic. Maybe it's photorealistic. Maybe it's alien. Maybe it's space. Who know knows what it is. But one of the things you have to be careful of is when you go out starting to look for assets, you'll find that you have this tendency to want to change your game to match whatever assets are available. And I think that is just a recipe for creating something that's a little mediocre and doesn't really have that creative spark that people like to see when they play games. So while it is, so you want to think about what you want your game to be like before you search for assets. It's much more creative to find assets that complete your concept than to create a concept around assets that are available. Okay? All right. So here's one place that you can go to look for solutions. There's a website called www.gameart2d.com. And on that website there's a wide variety of different kinds of animated sprites that you could use for 2D games. Here's an example of a ninja based game, it's kind of got a cartoony feel. There's a number of animated files that come with that. Most of these are available at some kind of license that permits re-use. So that's one place you can go. Another place you can go is to opengameart.org. That's another website that's similar to the first one. This one has a little bit more complicated set of licenses. Each person, each artist who submits work to this website can specify what kind of license they want on their art. And then you are responsible for making sure that you follow the license with that art. So here's an example of one of the enemies that are available from opengameart.org. A lot of different kinds of assets, you'll also find some 3D assets on this website which aren't relevant for our game, but may be relevant to you sometime in the future. A lot of interesting things on this website. All right. A third one you might find interesting is a website called Deviant Art. Deviant Art is a site that's for digital artists generally, not specifically about game art. Although, there is quite a selection of game art resources that are available on Deviant Art. Here's an example of one I pulled off. This kind of looks like a splash screen or something for some kind of medieval game. But what you'll find is that Deviant Art has much less clarity about what kinds of licenses are available for the art that is there. And so you may actually need to write to the artist, e-mail them or message them asking them for permission to use their art in your game for this course. If you go to this URL that's listed at the bottom of this screen, you'll find this piece of art there. You'll also find a bunch of collections of 2D game art that link from this piece of art. Sometimes in Deviant Art it's hard to find those collections of art that are relevant to what we are doing. All right. Another website you might find helpful is the Asset Store that is associated with the Unity Game engine. Unity is a program that helps you develop 3D games for many different platforms. And as part of that engine, there's a store in which artists can sell primarily 3D assets, but not exclusively 3D art. You'll also find a wide variety of 2D art as well. So, for example, this background image is a bunch of 2D art that's associated with kind of like an alien ocean scene. So each one of these pieces of art could be part of your background or part of your level if you're interested. Some of these are for sale, in which case you could buy them and then use them with whatever license you get when you buy them. Usually, if you buy art you get a license to do whatever you want with it. But there's also a lot of free art as well on the Unity Asset Store. As long as I'm mentioning the Unity Store, I might as well mention the Unreal Engine Store. The Unreal Engine is another game engine that people make games through. And there's an asset store associated with the Unreal Engine listed below. In the background you'll see a 2D game art associated with a desert game that you might want to make. And that art is available on the Unreal Engine Store as well. Again, sometimes for sale, sometimes for free, always with various kinds of license requirements. Now, inevitably, when you download some of this art you're going to find that you might want to tweak it in various ways. You might want to change the size. You might want to crop it tighter. You might want to clean up, or cut out, or erase different bits. You might want to change the color. So I just want to make you aware of a program called GIMP. GIMP is an open source version of a program like Photoshop. It's a program that enables you to edit pixels on images. It's good for converting images to different formats. It's good for doing painting of various kinds. And so, if you don't have Photoshop or don't have access to Photoshop, GIMP is a pretty good alternative for that. And that's available on all platforms, and that's free and open source. Finally, if you're interested in doing audio editing for your audio assets, there's a program called Audacity which you can get at this website here. And Audacity is, as Gimp is to visual images, Audacity is to audio files. So it will enable you to add audio effects to an audio file that you have, trim it, cut it, reduce the volume, increase the volume, all kinds of things like that. But that's a tool that's available to you to help develop your assets. All right. So, in summary, you're game is going to need assets. You can make them yourself, of course, either by basing them on someone else's art or by making them from scratch if you're that good. You can also get them online. If you get them online, you need make sure you pay attention to the license terms. Whatever art you get, I'm looking forward to seeing it, and we'll see them in some of your upcoming deliverables. Thank you. [MUSIC]
