Game dev Links
Created November 09, 2025
Last Updated November 13, 2025
Throughout the years, I’ve come across a large variety of websites that in one way or another have been quite the benefit to my creative efforts.
Here are a fair few that have been quite nice or have been interesting to try out.
Assets
- kenney nl
Kenney has made a large variety of models, textures and sprites over the years, all of which are free and fall under the CC0 license.He frequently releases new assets, so checking here often can be worth it.
He accepts donations, has some paid tools/games and also provides a all-in-one package which has all his free assets in one bundle that gets updated with all the new assets when they come out.
- polyhaven
Polyhaven is a "Public 3D Asset Library" has a large library of textures, models and HDRI's, all of which are free and fall under the CC0 license.They frequently release new assets, which are all of high quality. The texture downloads come with a lot of options to choose which parts you want to download and in what format.
They also have a blender plugin that allows you to import it directly to a project, without having to download it manually beforehand. I've used these textures quite a few times in my projects, released and not.
- ambientcg
AmbientCG, like Polyhaven, is a large library of CC0 assets that were made with the purpose of "Creating the best possible 3D assets, like materials, photo scans, HDRIs and more" to be shared freely on the internet.Whilst I haven't used this site as much as polyhaven, it is just as good of a service and they both provide a similar enough set of assets that they can be easily used together.
- the base mesh
A website containing a lot of plain models, all free to download and under the CC0 license.The models are to scale and have are basically ready to be textured, containing good topology and propper UV unwrapping.
- thoseawesomeguys prompts
Sprites for user inputs. You might have seen these before in a variety of (indie) games, these were designed to be as "generic" as possible.This, alongside the CC0 license, has made it quite the nicety for using it as a game's input UI.
- Public Domain Image Archive
The Public Domain Image Archive (PDIA) has a huge assortment of images that have all gone out-of-copyright and thus entered the public domain to be used freely.Whilst this site isn't a gamedev-first project, These images can still be used for various purposes, including, but not limited to, creating textures to use in games or as reference for historical imagery.
Besides, I really do like a lot of these images and find just looking at them very interesting.
- Texture Fabrik
One of my most recent findings (as of me making this page), Texture Fabrik has a variety of high quality images that can be used in the creation of textures/images of various kinds.These images fall under their donationware licensing model, meaning that the product is free, but a donation can be made if desired. Otherwise they request that you'd credit them when using these images.
The also have a page showing various ways that people have used their images in various works.
- Material Maker
A free and open source tool to make procedural materials using nodes, which can then be exported to an image set, or directly to a material to be used in Godot, Unity or Unreal Engine.Map making
- func_godot
A direct successor to Qodot, func_godot is a tool that allows the importing of quake map files (and source vmf files) into the godot game engine.It has been quite nice as I find using the hammer editor far easier for level making, especially the early block-out stage.
- J.A.C.K
J.A.C.K is a Hammer editor replacement, originally created by Crystice Softworks for their Volatile game engine and game: Perilous warp.It does not require the installation of any of their games, nor any source game, meaning it can be used for most any project.
It can export the maps to the map format, which can then be imported into, amongst other things, godot using the previously mentioned func_godot plugin.
I find the hammer level editor to be incredibly nice to work with, and this makes that far easier for non-source games.
The software can be downloaded for free from their website (the provided link here), or from steam, where it does cost money, but has
more recent features, that usually becomes available in the free version when the paid version gets
another major update.
- Trenchbroom
Trenchbroom is a primarily QUAKE game level editor, but can be used to make levels for other games, as has been done quite a lot.It has become quite popular over the years, especially due to func_godot, but I personally can't get into a good workflow with it, unlike Jack.
It has some features that Jack doesn't have that I do find quite nice, mainly the UV editor preview, which shows selected face on the texture it has, allowing you to see where and how it's positioned on it; Particularly nice when working with trim sheets or smaller faces. It's also open source, which combined with its large community results in a rather active development cycle, adding more features to it that make it far nicer to use.
- Tiled
A 2D tile based level editor, this has been on my radar for quite some time. It exists and has been updated since way back in 2004 and has gotten it's 1.0 release back in 2017!
I personally don't make many 2D games at the moment, but this is still something I really want to try
out when I do go back to making a 2D game.
It is supported by many game engines in various ways and has a couple generic export formats to be used
in other engines/systems that don't explicitly have support for it.
- LDtk
A more modern/recent tool, similar to Tiled, which had been made and developed alongside a game to be used as a proof-of-concept.Whilst lacking some functionality, as been stated by the developer himself, It too has quite a lot that I want to try out at some point. This means I'll have to decide between this and Tiled whenever I start work on a 2D game...
- level design book
This is an incredibly good resource on level design, being mostly on the theory side, which is a good thing in and of itself.It is constantly being updated with more sources, including talks from the Game Developer Conference (GDC).
Something that I do recommend going through when making levels.
Reference
- physicallybased.info
This site provides a vast amount of values to use for PBR materials, both in 3d modeling software and game engines.I find myself going here on occasion when I want to make something look accurate to the real world, though I do still tend to make changes to it here and there when it doesn't quite feel right to my eye.
- spriters resource
A large resource of sprites, models, textures and audio files from most every game. These are mostly ripped by the community but are still very interesting to look at to get an idea of how a game asset has been made.This site used to be multiple separate sites for each individual asset type, but has recently been merged into a single site.
- noclip.website
Here you can see many game levels in their entirety, allowing you to fly through them to get a better look at how they're structured.This is a very cool way to see how both old and recent games make their levels, how some small areas can feel far bigger than they really are.
- game UI database
A large archive of game UI's, sorted in various ways to allow you to get an idea how a lot of games have done their UI work.Frequently updated with new games, this is a good collection to look through if you want to make a UI and have it feel right.
Audio/Music
- sonniss gameaudiogdc
Sonniss is a company that provides royalty free sound effects, which are used by quite a few large companies.During GDC they release a large amount of these sound collections for free, which can be downloaded directly or through their official torrent file.
- strudel
Strudel is, besides an Austrian pastry, a code based audio generator. It has a large array of audio samples to use within its system and can be used to make some quite complex tracks.
- bosca ceoil
[bús-ka kyó-al] — a music box.Bosca Ceoil is a music maker which is very easy to work with, having a large variety of synthesized instruments.
It is very neat, but due to the synthesized instruments that it provides, somewhat limited in what it can be used.
- lmms
An open source Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), originally made for Linux, but now also available for windows and mac.It is a good free alternative to FL studio and is very nice to use. Though like FL studio, it can seem somewhat daunting to get into due to the large amount of things that you can do with it.
- steam audio
A system developed by Valve, which allows for very good environmental audio in games, think of audio sounding muffled when the source is behind a wall.It has official plugins for, amongst others, Unity and Unreal Engine, but doesn't for Godot.
I find this a very cool system, but have not used it that much as of yet.
Back in December of 2024, Valve made it open source, allowing for more integrations.
Miscellaneous
- paulbourke asciiart
I found this site once when I was trying to make a tool to create ascii art from text. It didn't go anywhere, but this site was still a very neat example of ascii gradients.
- Foyezes: making a LUT
A neat trick on making a custom color LUT (Look Up Table) without having to use much guesswork.
The video bowls down to the following (click to expand)