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Sunday, February 26, 2006

250 free handdrawn textures

I was searching through my old archives and came across a set of 250 textures that I thought were long lost. Heck, they aren't doing much good sitting on a slowly decaying CD-R so I figured I'd share them with everyone.

Click here to download CircleTextures.zip (4.49 MB)

Use these however you desire. Mash them up, put them in your games. If you end up releasing a game using these graphics to the public, all I ask is that you put a link to this website someplace the nether depths of your credits.

They are a few years old, so they are all 128 x 128 images using a common fixed 8-bit palette. I also included a text file that explains the naming convention.

If any of you are new to graphics tiles, here's a little illustration that explains all the parts. You have a set of 14 titles that can be used to make any irregular shape and smoothly transition between two titles. For example. Suppose you had a water title and a land title. With the transition titles, you could easily create a pretty shore line.


Tile creation is a dying art since modern 3D terrain engines have all sorts of wonderful blending capabilities for auto generating transition tiles. But if you are working on a game for handhelds or casual games, it is a nice technique to know.

Enjoy!
Danc.

PS: Here's another picture I found! This is the Colossi, a giant floating airwhale that was genetically engineered to serve as the mothership of a parasitic race of super spies known as Puppeteers.



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20 Comments:

Blogger bunnyhero said...

wow, very nice work! this is very generous of you.

2/26/2006 3:51 PM  
Blogger Casey said...

These are gorgeous, and perfect for a project I'm working on!

*yoink*

You da man!

2/27/2006 1:05 AM  
Anonymous Hunty said...

Beautiful. What were these for originally?

2/27/2006 12:44 PM  
Blogger Danc said...

These were originally for a 3D rpg called The Circle, which was being developed in parallel to the first Unreal using the then unreleased Unreal engine.

Enter your typical tale of woe...inexperienced development team, unstable technology platform that was delayed by 2 years, and an overly ambitious design. The title was canceled, Unreal was finally released a while later and the rest, as they say is history. :-)

There are lots of such projects out there. These orphaned projects have impressive art resources, some nifty code and great concept art. Yet they are buried for all enternity. It seems to be a sad fate for resources that could have been quite useful to someone someplace.

take care
Danc.

2/27/2006 12:55 PM  
Anonymous Darren Clark said...

Brilliant artwork mate, a much appreciated gift. :)

Just a wee observation: you can drop about 1 meg from the zip if you get rid of the thumbnail file inside it. Doesn't bother me as I'm on broadband but just one for those still on the tin can and bit of string connections.

Thanks a lot.

2/27/2006 2:38 PM  
Anonymous mcf501@york.ac.uk said...

Thank you *hug, being a poor student mashing away at opengl (both sence of the word), i need textures!

<3

2/28/2006 8:01 AM  
Blogger Raymond said...

I would have loved to have seen this project finished. I did think at the time that your story was a bit too influenced by the Dark Crystal. But then, folks really never did understand it, remember when you had to try to explain it to Epic? Hahahah... I don't think they ever did get it... oh wait, maybe that was me that never got it. :)

--Ray

3/01/2006 11:43 AM  
Anonymous Paul said...

Very nice work.

3/01/2006 2:58 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The quality of a tiled terrain with proper textures will never be duplicated by 3d engines.
Thank you for this artwork. When my title gets finished I'll include your name in the credits (and if I don't please tell me inmediatly so I can do it).

Thank you very much!
Guimo

3/01/2006 8:50 PM  
Anonymous flx said...

really nice work, thanks for sharing it, really

3/02/2006 5:06 AM  
Anonymous king said...

Great artwork! Thanks for sharing.

3/02/2006 12:13 PM  
Blogger Rahul said...

Am I the only person who thinks the Colossi looks like a gigantic hovering phallus?

3/03/2006 3:50 AM  
Blogger Raymond said...

rahul!? You pervert!

I would never admit to seeing that!

(though I think Danc and I once had that discussion... waaaaay back... :) )

--Ray

PS> Danc, I still think it would make a great story.

3/03/2006 11:18 AM  
Blogger Danc said...

Hola!

Ray is the purest of the snowey white angels in my life. As long as he is comfortable with my drawings of football field sized, tentacle dripping, penis whales, I feel comfortably in the moral clear.

Loved the Circle story. It had a fun 'hard fantasy' take that reminded me of the Hard Scifi, but with a magical bent. Lots of magic, but no elves to be seen anywhere. Some of the Japanese manga falls into the same genre with its mixture of spirituality, epic magic and truely bizarre characters.

I should send you my design notes, Ray, and after your trilogy is done maybe you could mine its carcass for an interesting short story.

(Still can't wait to read your next book. It is cruel to give a fellow just one book.)

-Danc.

3/03/2006 12:17 PM  
Blogger Raymond said...

I wub you too Danc. ;)

Doesn't Ringworld have a puppeteer race? They're also skittish and aloof, as I recall.

--Ray

PS> I have already been influenced by a certain component of the Circle. In fact the story I'm currently doing has a very subtle tie to it. Though you'd probably never identify it. One day I hope to have more time to develop the characters and make a story around it...

3/06/2006 1:34 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey, nice tiles! You need more whuffie! ;)

I'm working on a Palm Pilot/PocketPC RPG under the GPL, and have been looking around for some good tilesets; these will be very helpful.

Big thanks! I'm assuming these are in the public domain?

-- MichaelB

3/07/2006 4:00 PM  
Anonymous Richard from PyWeek said...

This is incredibly generous of you, Danc. I've taken the liberty of mentioning this post in my game programming challenge at http://www.pyweek.org/2/

I'm really hoping that the theme for the challenge is amenable to using your tiles. They're just so damned pretty.

3/09/2006 4:50 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Danc!

Thank you for the great graphics that you provide for free. I just have your opposite problem: If I'm not wrong, you are a graphic and can't program a line, instead I'm a programmer and can't draw a line :) so your images are very useful to me.

I have developed a demo of a small shoot'em up prototype in 3D and I have used a sub-set of your "circle" textures for the ground: http://apocalyx.sourceforge.net/demos.php#dragonsride

Then, in the next days, I'm planning to do some 2D game programming and I find your "Cute" tiles very useful. If I'll succeed to set-up some simple game using them, I'll inform you.

Thank you again for your work!

--
Ciao, leo
APOCALYX 3D Engine
http://apocalyx.sf.net

5/17/2007 5:46 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi, I really like these and might be using them in my own attempt to make a game. I was wondering about something though, in the two batch files included in the archive, what is this "alchemy" program?

11/10/2007 6:16 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

These are wonderful, absolutely beautiful. They are a perfect match for the way I'd like to use them.
I want to use them on the open source game BZFlag (bzflag.org). Unfortunately your instructions to "Use these however you desire." is not sufficient for BZFlag. It's a little vague. Legally, you can not be attributed in bzflag source, without the textures being released under some kind of "official" licence. Just about any open-source license will do. Perhaps creative commons or CC-no-mod would suit this usage?
Thankyou in advance, if you can see fit to apply a licence to these textures.

6/25/2008 8:09 PM  

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