Where To Find Free, 2D Pixel Game Assets For Your Indie Game

Against corporate memphis design style graphics, a bold title reads "Where to Find Free, 2D Pixel Game Assets"

Making one of your first indie games is an exciting endeavor, and you’ve picked the right medium for one of your first games. Pixel art is such a diverse medium for game art, and there are many resources to find free 2D game assets for your pixel art indie game.

You might be choosing pixel art because of the breadth of pixel art game assets to choose from. Given that pixel art editors have been around for a while, pixel art assets might be the most abundant of game assets.

Or you might be choosing pixel art assets to easily modify assets if the pack is missing something. Well, maybe pixel art isn’t easy, but it’s definitely easier than adding your own 3D asset. Pixel art can be a lot easier with help and tutorials! Check out my article Make Pixel Art Assets for Your Indie Game: The Best Resources.

Or you might be choosing pixel art assets for the player experience. Because pixel art is abstract, it allows the player to imagine what the pixels could look like in reality. When you played the old pokemon games, don’t tell me you weren’t imagining epic fights with your Charizard, despite Charizard only being a few pixels! 

Nonetheless, we can agree pixel art is a great game art medium. But where do we find quality pixel art game assets? Here’s a short list of my favorites!

Itch.io – An Organized Marketplace for Game Assets, Including 2D Pixel Assets

Itch.io is one of the most organized websites for finding game assets, and my personal favorite. Itch is a marketplace and online space for game developers to make and publish games, sell games, sell game assets, and connect via game jams, devlogs, and community posts. Itch’s open-revenue sharing model draws many creators. This is a plus for a game dev trying to find specific assets or assets of a specific style. By the way, open-revenue means creators decide how much they will split with itch, who hosts their products. This is a very creator-friendly marketplace compared to others like Unity’s asset store, which take a fixed percentage cut.

Because the marketplace draws in so many creators, it also draws creators looking to just share their art. You’ll find many free game assets, if you’re able to navigate the site well

How to Navigate to the Itch Pixel Art Game Assets

What makes itch.io accessible is it’s use of tags. Once you press ‘Browse’ at the top left and then ‘Assets,’ you’re taken to the game asset marketplace.

If you’re looking for free pixel art assets, simply navigate to the left sidebar and filter by ‘Free’ assets, and then select pixel art as a tag.

If you already know the resolution of the game you want to make, you can even filter by 16×16 assets or 32×32 assets in the tags!

Personal Favorite Itch Assets

One of my personal favorites of the free 2d game assets is the free version of Sproutlands – a cozy farming asset pack by Cup Noobles. The characters and animations are adorable, and the assets are cohesive, and there are a ton of them! Even more come in the paid $3.99 pack. Additionally, a problem I’ve come across is finding a UI pack that matches the tile and sprite asset pack I’ve downloaded. Cup Noobles has created a cohesive (and extensive) UI pack to match Sproutlands, with the premium also being $3.99.

Another of my favorites is Pixel Frog’s Pixel Adventure Pack. The assets Pixel Frog created are not as cohesive as Sproutlands, but I’ve truly appreciated what I can do mechanically in game engines with his animated assets. I actually made one of my first prototype games using this asset pack following Youtuber Coco Code’s series: Godot first steps. It’s a 3 video tutorial series, and Coco continues to add more videos to the series.

Kenney Assets – The Free 2D Game Asset King

Kenney has been creating a free game asset database for 10 years. He is a legend in the indie game dev community for his service. His instagram bio reads “My mission is to make game development accessible for everyone,,” and he certainly has done that. 

Kenney’s website houses all of his public assets. On his website, you can easily navigate to assets where he has everything from 1-bit UI asset packs to low poly 3D packs with tons of characters. I appreciate Kenney’s commitment to the worlds he builds. While browsing his asset packs, you can see his asset packs maintain consiste various styles. Many low poly 3D assets can be mixed and matched and same with 1-bit packs.

What Makes Kenney’s database of Game Assets Stand Out

Kenney’s website is not just good for game assets but also for general beginner game developers. He has three handy free tools I recommend game devs checking out. They include a dialogue avatar creator, a creature sprite creator, and a ship sprite creator, all with mix and match features. And the last feature I’ll mention abotu his website, is he also has “StarterKits” available for the Godot game engine. These are Godot-compatible source codes that you can build on to make your game dev journey a bit easier.

Screenshot of Kenney's website, housing many 2D assets
Screenshot of Kenney’s website, housing many 2D assets

OpenGameArt – An Oldie but a Goodie When It Comes to Free License

Lastly, OpenGameArt needs to be mentioned. OpenGameArt is a website that houses a collection of free/open source game assets. Assets include 2D art, 3D art, textures, music, and more. While the host is anonymous, they have been running the site since 2009 with just donations to keep it going. While the user interface of the site could use some improvements, you can navigate to different community driven collections, forums, and leaderboards.

One Reason to Use OpenGameArt

One benefit of using OpenGameArt is how community driven it is. When communities band together, they can move mountains (or make expansive asset packs in the same style!). You can navigate to collections by pressing on “Collect” in the top menu. One of the more popular collections is the Liberated Pixel Cup Collection. Over a decade ago, this project was started to make a collection of free licensed work all in a similar style of top 3/4 top down view pixel art assets. This was a novel idea then, and it can still be used today. While I still opt for Kenney’s style of compatible assets, there is something cool about having many artists collaborate and add their own flair to a collection.

Screenshot of OpenGameArt's website, one of the oldest repositories of free license game assets
Screenshot of OpenGameArt’s website, one of the oldest repositories of free license game assets

Conclusion

You’re on track to find some of the best assets for your indie game now! But if you browse these sites and still feel like you haven’t found what you’re looking for but don’t have the budget to pay a freelance pixel artist, check out my article Make Pixel Art Assets for Your Indie Game: The Best Resources.