In an inspiring tale of perseverance and tenacity, a company called Tiny Speck was forced to shut down after releasing their Flash based game Glitch, (which had over 150,000 users) - and these same guys went on to found the “unicorn” we now know as Slack.
What is so incredibly cool is that despite having to close down their game operation, they made a decision that few companies in their position have: they dedicated all of the art assets from their game to the Public Domain. Over 10,000 beautiful pieces of game art - everything from characters to worlds, food, furniture - you name it. And the art has this unique style to it, making it really different from other open source stuff you can find, as well as high end - which is so hard to achieve when you’re cobbling together free artwork.
God Bless these guys for having had the uber generosity to make that art public, so that other game developers might profit! It’s a pretty cool piece of karma that they went on to found Slack, the teams collaboration and communication Saas platform.
I’ve always tried to use these pieces as I could in the last few years, but I have to admit that since the SWF to SVG conversion wasn’t exactly perfect, I struggled to find elements that I could modify enough to be usable in my own designs. Well I’m proud to say that Kwippe now boasts over 400 of the most gorgeous pieces from the Glitch collection. While we weren’t able to get everything I wanted - in particular the inhabitants and few other key sections were not usable in SVG format - I was able to adjust a great number of pieces for use inside our editor. This meant stripping out the gradients, as right now we aren’t set up to process gradients from our database. That would slow down everything, and my plan is to implement gradients in the editor, then once I have a good method for applying them, develop a compatible method for pre-processing SVGs with gradients so that it will remain lightweight.
The flattened stuff is just lovely - despite the loss of “3d” like quality. And the great thing is that it will be easy to create a color coordinated set from the Glitch collection, and once I add back the Spine export which I backlogged for now, game developers will be able to quickly throw together a set of elements, and export to Spine for immediate animation.
Very exciting! Thanks again to the team at Glitch - now Slack - for making is a better app.