Creating good assets is a difficult process, and takes a lot of practice to get right. However, if you don't have an artist or musician on your team don't fret! There are plenty of good resources out there that are available for free, and this post will show you how and where to find them, and what licensing agreements to look out for.

LICENSES AND MEANINGS:

When it comes to using pre-made assets, you'll need to keep your eyes peeled as to what licenses apply to the assets you're using. Below is a list of ones you'll commonly see:

- Public Domain / CC0: These you can use without any restrictions. No credit is required, and you can even claim it as your own and redistribute it.

- Attribution 3.0 / 4.0: These mean you can use them in any product, as long as you provide credit to the creator

- Royalty Free: This one is slightly confusing, because even though it has the word free in it - it just means that you don't need to share any royalties / revenue you make from the product. Most of the assets tagged as royalty free normally cost money to license, so these are pretty much out of the equation.

FONTS:

For fonts, the best site to use is https://www.dafont.com/. In order to make sure you only see fonts that you can make use of for free, you can apply these filters when searching: 

GRAPHICS:

For graphics there are numerous sites you can look at, but these ones are some of the most popular ones:

https://opengameart.org/

For Open Game Art, you'll have to check the licenses here for each asset individually. Please refer to the above LICENSE TYPE section to see what each license entails:

https://ambientcg.com/

Ambient CG offers a bunch of public domain textures. This means you can use any of the ones on the site without any credit to the creators.

https://www.3dmodelscc0.com/categories

3d Models CC0 is great to get hold of some decent 3d models. These are all public domain as well.

https://clara.io/library

Clara.io is also a great place for models, but keep in mind that the licensing differs for every model:

SOUNDS:

https://freesound.org/

Free sound requires an account, but offers high quality sounds that you can use. Remember to check the licensing however!

MUSIC:

https://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/

Odds are you've heard many of his songs before, especially on Youtube videos. Kevin Mcleod offers a wide range of royalty free, public domain music which you can use without any credit.

3D ANIMATIONS:

https://www.mixamo.com/

Adobe has really done game developers a solid here. Mixamo is an expansive library of AAA quality humanoid animations. Simply upload a 3d model, and watch the auto rigger go to work.

TIPS FOR USING PREMADE ASSETS:

One of the most important bits of a game is getting your assets to feel like they all fit together. This is rather hard to achieve if you're making use of a mixture of assets from different creators. Color palettes are super important for consistency, and with a bit of fiddling in an image editor of your choice, assets can be repurposed to align with a selected color palette. If you're looking for a good color palette, head on over to https://lospec.com/.

Art styles also need to match. If you're going for a pixel art game, rarely ever does vector art compliment it (Unless it's on the UI as it can often look rather stylish). If you're making a 3d game, make sure that all your assets are either low poly assets, voxel assets, or high detail assets (which I don't recommend as it's incredibly hard to find good high quality assets for free).