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[screamingbrainstudios]

Several years ago, I began a sort of "rescue" project producing game assets utilizing abandonware or software that can no longer be purchased or acquired, including several particularly obscure tools like an isometric rendering engine or long-lost texture authoring tools. These are not "asset rips," almost everything I've released is the result of tedious experimentation, working with software that has no documentation, going through countless iterations, and coming up with my own techniques since there are no videos or articles to learn from. There are now over 18,000 individual tiles, textures, and sprites available completely free, and they have all been released under the Public Domain (CC0) license. That means every single asset is free to use in any project, commercial or non-commercial, edited or modified, or in any possible way you can think of.

There are a number of tutorials or guides on the main website related to working with the different asset packs or creating your own custom graphics, as well as various niche or obscure techniques and tricks. Topics include making seamless hexagonal textures, creating isometric tiles using cartesian transformation, spherical surface textures for planets, working with convolution filters, and more!

The different types of assets include everything from textures, isometric tile-sets, planets, hexagonal tiles, interface elements, frames, space backgrounds, animated flags of the world, board and table games, buttons, vfx masks, and a whole bunch of other stuff! Hopefully this is something you guys find useful!

Official Website - https://screamingbrainstudios.com
itch.io - https://screamingbrainstudios.itch.io/
OpenGameArt - https://opengameart.org/users/screaming-brain-studios

[nathy after dark]

Incredible! Bookmarking.

One thing to be clear on--how do you know none of the assets you produced include patterns/graphics/etc. that are copyright-owned by the creators of the "abandonware" programs you used? Because, just because something is abandonware, doesn't make it public domain, and if any of the assets you produced contain assets from these programs, even modified, then you don't necessarily have the right to release those assets into the public domain.

I'm not a lawyer but I'm making a visual novel using public domain and Creative Commons assets and I try to be extremely careful about it.

[screamingbrainstudios]

Just about all of the assets are my own actual creations from step-1 to step-100, typically using lots of random seeds, procedural generation, and my own node networks or pipelines. These aren't "asset rips" from the internal libraries that came with these tools, these are my own creations made utilizing the techniques and features of the abandoned software, since they cannot be purchased or acquired anymore. Quite certain I haven't used any patterns or copyrighted material along the way, especially since the majority of the assets are procedurally generated by myself and then edited even further to make them more usable!

There are a few cases where I have used public domain photographs or textures to create isometric conversions or tile-sets, though these images were also from public domain releases (Such as the Golgotha Texture Collection, various CC0 OpenGameArt collections, or images that were declared released into the public domain on archived websites.) In a few cases, I have used built-in "masks" or "shapes" that come with some of these tools to create some more specialized assets, but everything here is 100% public domain from start to finish, and the result of countless hours of experimenting, iterating, and thousands of individual renders! In addition, I do actually own the paid license for each of the software titles in my collection (Although the companies themselves may have gone defunct) so the asset releases are all mine, I just can't distribute any of the tools I'm using

The Space Backgrounds and Sky Backgrounds are all procedurally generated nebulas and clouds made using several tools, such as SpaceScape, Picture Styles, Genetica, and GIMP

2D Planets were all made starting with a procedural generation tool called TexturesForPlanets that utilizes fault formation to first create the planet surface textures, those were then mapped onto a sphere in Blender, then rendered using no lighting or material properties to produce easy-to-shade planets

Isometric Poker and Dominoes were all made by hand-drawing hundreds of render masks, extruding pseudo-3D isometric renders of every possible card or domino face combination, creating composites and overlays for each isometric angle or top-down perspective, and then assembled by hand into sprite sheets

Isometric Tile-sets are either textures I have made myself using procedural node networks or public domain photographs run through texture synthesis or manual editing to produce seamless textures, and converted into isometric tiles using the World Creator 3.0, Texture Maker, or GIMP

Textures and Mask packs have been created using Genetica, MapZone, Illusionae, Material Maker, and several other procedural texture authoring tools

Animated Flags of the World have all been created using my own animated height masks, public domain solid colors of world flags (these are available from flagpedia.net) and my own sprite-sheet builder

Top-Down tiles have all been created using a mix of manual editing and stretching textures, blend modes, and compositing using multi-colored image masks

Hexagonal Tiles were all created by using a few techniques outlined on my website, rendered and extruded into pseudo-3D tiles with the World Creator 3.0, and then manually arranged into tile-sheets

Platform Tiles and Breakout Kit have been made using custom grayscale image masks, assembled by hand into sheets, colorized using a type of multiply-blend mode, and batch exported as different styles and variations

I know that the assets are public domain because I am the one who made the assets! I am merely using abandoned/unavailable software to make the assets, using the limitations or features and low-resolution/old school techniques to produce large quantities of free assets for everyone to use!

[nathy after dark]

Freakin' awesome! 

[screamingbrainstudios]

The tutorials and articles on the main website tend to relate to a lot of obscure graphic techniques, image filters, or how to work with or create expansions to the various asset packs I've released. There's also a big list of free tools for working with graphics, texture authoring, terrain generation, and some other random utilities that are just useful in general! I won't claim to know exactly what I'm doing, but I know that I am one of the only people left in the world using a couple of these tools (there are a few rather obscure ones that were difficult to find when they were originally available in the first place, including some old game modding tools)

Some of the software I work with has been part of my workflow for well over a decade, but a lot of things can change in a decade, so some of the companies and their tools were basically made obsolete.. I just decided to take it upon myself as a personal mission to keep making as many random assets as possible, since I was already doing that for my own personal projects, and just giving them to everyone haha.