Thank you to the people who draw the things I cannot

I cannot draw#

I can write you a dungeon generator. I can sit down on a Tuesday evening and have rooms, corridors, a boss at the far end and treasure scattered about in a way that feels deliberate rather than random, and I will enjoy every minute of it.

What I cannot do is draw a convincing barrel.

I have tried. I have sat there with a sixteen by sixteen grid open and produced something that could charitably be described as a brown smudge, and then spent twenty minutes nudging pixels around before admitting that the problem is not the pixels. Some people have an eye for this. I have an eye for why the pathfinding is going the long way round.

That matters more than it sounds like it should, because a game made of coloured rectangles is where most of my projects used to die. Not because the code stopped working, but because you look at it one evening and some quiet part of your brain decides it isn't real. You can't show it to anyone. You can't even show it to yourself. It stops being a game you are making and becomes a folder you keep meaning to open.

Dungeon Divers#

The current project is Dungeon Divers, a top down co-op dungeon crawler built in Godot. Gates tear open across an overworld, you go through them with up to three friends, and what is on the other side is almost completely dark. Light is the whole mechanic. You carry it, you run out of it, and it tells the things in there exactly where you are.

Here is the town the divers come back to.

I did not draw any of that. Every building, tree, path and villager comes from Tiny Town, a free pack by Kenney. The user interface, every panel and button and frame, comes from his UI Adventure Pack. Both are released under Creative Commons Zero, which in plain terms means he has given them away completely. Use them in anything, including something you sell, and credit is optional.

That is the bit that gets me. The licence file in the folder says, and I am quoting it, "Support us by crediting Kenney or www.kenney.nl (this is not mandatory)". Not mandatory. The man has made hundreds of these packs, given the lot away, and then gone out of his way to tell you that you don't owe him a mention.

Well, you are getting one anyway.

The dungeon itself#

Below the overworld, the dungeons are built from DungeonTileset II by 0x72, which is also Creative Commons Zero, and which an awful lot of you will recognise the moment you see it because half the roguelikes on itch.io are wearing it.

The walls, the floors, the chests, the skeletons that shuffle about in the dark, all of it is that tileset. My generator decides where the rooms go and how they join up, and 0x72's art is what makes the result look like a crypt instead of a flowchart.

There are a few other packs in there as well that I owe thanks to. The Enchanted Forest frames, the Fantasy RPG NPC frames and the weapon sheets, all licensed for personal and commercial use by people who did not have to do that either.

Why this matters so much to the rest of us#

If you can draw, free assets are a convenience. If you cannot, they are the difference between a project existing and not existing.

The first time I dropped Kenney's tiles into the overworld I had been staring at grey boxes on a green background for about a fortnight. It took an evening to swap them in, and when I loaded the game afterwards there was a town. Not a placeholder for a town. A town, with roofs and fences and a path going somewhere. I played it for half an hour that night and did not write a single line of code, I just walked around in it.

That half an hour is the point. The code had not changed at all, the game was no further along by any measure, but I believed in it again, and belief is the thing that gets a hobby project finished. Nobody abandons a game because the dungeon generator is hard. They abandon it because one evening it stops feeling real and they never quite come back to it.

I should be honest about the limits, mind. Free art does not make your game look good on its own. You still have to pick packs that live together, keep to one grid size, resist shoving in a gorgeous sprite that belongs to a completely different world, and accept that some things will need doing yourself eventually. I have thrown away more combinations than I have kept. But the floor is so much higher than it used to be, and the distance between an idea and something you can actually look at has gone from months to an evening.

Pay them if you can#

All of this is free and most of it does not even ask for credit, which makes it very easy to take and say nothing.

So, two small things. Credit them properly, in the game and not just in a readme nobody opens. And if you have any money in it at all, send some back. Kenney has a Patreon and a donate page, plenty of artists sell the same packs they give away, and buying something you could have had for nothing is a perfectly good way of saying thank you.

Dungeon Divers has a credits screen and those names are on it. Without them I would still be looking at a brown smudge, wondering why I ever thought I could make a game.

Thank you, genuinely.

Dungeon DiversGodot