Question

I am looking at building a 2d game for the iphone. I am using the cocos2d framework to build the game. However, I am not very good with graphics so I was hoping there were some good repositories out there for some free 2d sprites that are open source. I searched around but most of the articles are 2 years older or more. Does anyone have places they go to get 2d graphics for games? Also could I use 3d graphics in a 2d game and if so any resources for 3d graphics would be nice to.

Answer 1

I went down this road several times before. It is not fruitful. You will spend a lot of time trying to find free sprites. You amass lots of sprites all of which don’t really fit what you need in terms of: looks, size, transparency, image format, shape, and what not. You’ll waste time converting, scaling, filtering and otherwise mangling with these images. Still, the end result is nothing but a gross mashup of graphic styles.

As a game programmer with no artist, it’s your job to define the size and shape of the images used in your game. An artist can later fill these out perfectly.

You’ll be much better off to simply use dummy graphics which may not be more than a color gradient, a circle, an X, etc. But at least they’re the correct size, shape and format. In particular size and shape will ultimately define how the game plays. You don’t want that to be defined by whatever “free sprites” you can find.