I’ve had some of my favourite memories programming for Soar, an ambitious 3D space ship game. Soar taught me about optimizing for garbage collectors, game engine architecture, primitive AI at scale, and so much more. It took me two months, working full-time, to develop a playable alpha for Soar. I was proud, but 4 years later, I realized I spent most of my time finding assets for my game.
If you’ve ever had to incorporate media such as images, videos, or music into your commercial side project, you will find that licensing and attribution is complicated, with most assets require licensing fees or are non-commercial. I was a high school student at the time, so I couldn’t afford to hire an artist or to buy assets (Try convincing your parents that you need a thousand dollars to make a game!).
This motivated me to create Asset Hub. It’s a growing repository of 10,000 free commercial-ready creative common assets that are immediately usable for your project.
I’m considering this initial release an alpha, so you will encounter some rough edges. Asset Hub will be extremely malleable; I made the Asset Hub Trello board public, so please comment on features, ideas, and bugs. I will be closely working with artists and game developers from the University of Waterloo Games Institute to potentially work on:
- an artist asset pipeline that supports revisions
- a search API to query and download assets dynamically (imagine a game where all the models are random!)
- Refining UX/UI/Workflows
I’m excited to see what Asset Hub will become. Asset Hub would have saved me countless hours when making Soar, so I’m hoping it will become part of an indie game developers tool-belt.
robertg
