Hello, I am currently making a game, it is suppose to become a multiplayer RPG, with the visual style of gameboy pokemon or zelda games. So camera in the air, aiming down. You see the top and front of everything. Currently, there is one issue that really demotivates me. I’m using a tileset that isn’t really beautiful to look at. Around some tiles there are borders, some there aren’t. Also the character, it’s one from those pokemon games, which is copyrighted I believe. That’s an issue. Now it’s pretty easy to search for tilesets on google, and you get quite a lot of results. But what I can’t figure out is, are they copyrighted or not, are they free to use or not… Maybe one of you ran into a similar issue and/or know a (few) tileset that fulfill my needs, so that’s why I ask here. Hopefully one of you can help me out. I don’t mind to give credits to the creator, after all, with his work my game doesn’t look like poop. But the tileset(s) has to be free, and no issues with copyright. If I am starting to make money out of the game, I don’t mind sharing a bit of the money with the creator. But it will be a while before I make money. More info (+ history) if you’re interested: I hate it when I feel demotivated. It happened to me before in 2009. I was also going for a multiplayer RPG, and in a way I was farther than I am now, however, the system behind it was never going to work. It was written in HTML + PHP + MySQL. It was all I knew then. To move around on the map, you had to press one of the four buttons (up, down, left, right…..). Then the page refreshed, PHP calculated your new location, and was selecting the terrain around you, and build it up in HTML. Yah….. wanna play that? I don’t think so. And so I stopped at some point. But it had battling system, gear, shops, storyline could be added. What I have done now, is start from scratch. The first thing I tried, was to fix all the things that was bothering me before. And I did, except for the tilesets/graphics. Clientside is HTML5 and Javascript. So the map and character is being rendered in the canvas. Using AJAX and JSON to send and receive data from server. Like extending the map. I build a chunk and cache system in Javascript, to reduce server load. Walking around goes with keypresses now. Map moving smoothly while I move. CPU-usage is very low that even laptops or 7-year old computer can run it without using much of the CPU. Even when unlocking the framerates, I can reach 150FPS on a Core i3 or i5 laptop. There’s still a lot to do though. Next couple of things will improve visual quality further. Then having to think out how to do the multiplayer part. I’ve done a little bit of Node.js and socketio already. I am somewhat impressed by it, but there are some downsides in my opinion. But that probably have to do it. After that it’s time to fully build the database, connect everything, and add more features into the game, but that wasn’t an issue before. Ah well, this is it for now. I hope any of you can help me in this case. I wish I could show what I’ve done so far but can’t yet.

Have a look at [Open game art](http://opengameart.org), there’s a lot of stuff there, and each submission has a licence next to it which states quite clearly what you can do with it.

Yeah thanks. Yesterday I spend some hours searching the web (and not just google images) for more and better information about tilesets and possibility of using them. I indeed came across open game art, and some others. From what I’ve noticed, is that some of the tilesets does not work (yet) with the system I’ve build. It’s because I’ve build the system around the tiles I had from many many years ago. Some tiles are full with just 1 type of terrain, let say grass. While there are many (most) tiles that are half on half. So half grass, half sand. A crossover of terrain. This keeps things as 1 layer, but it requires a lot of different tiles if I would have a lot of different terrains. Now I’ve seen tilesets that uses transparency to make a nice crossover from terrains. This requires 2+ layers, but doesn’t require a lot of tiles. Just 9 (3×3) for each terrain type. In the center the full tile of a certain terrain. On the left, half transparent + half terrain. Right other way around. Then up and down, and the corners. Few examples of what I mean: Single layer: [http://raw.githubusercontent.com/tales/sourceoftales/master/tiles/terrain.png](http://raw.githubusercontent.com/tales/sourceoftales/master/tiles/terrain.png) Dual layer: [http://opengameart.org/sites/default/files/terrain\_2.png](http://opengameart.org/sites/default/files/terrain_2.png) Now what I’ve build was for single layer. But I think adding a second layer will be much better. This allows me to put objects on the map without having me to create a separate tile for it. Like for example wooden floor, with a chair on top of it. Or a stone floor, with that same chair on top of it. This isn’t just with chairs but with everything. Fences, walls, houses… so many things. But using second layer may also decrease performance by a bit. Anyway I’m still thinking things out here, on what to do next.