I'm working on an old-school 2d side-scrolling game for the iPhone for a personal project, but I only have the programming knowledge and not the talent/knowledge required to create the images and sounds. Obviously, I'm not just going to steal this stuff from other games and I can't afford to hire folks to do it for me. Are there sites out there that provide royalty-free access to graphics and sounds? Thanks. LSL
MIDI files from dead composers like Beethoven, Mozart etc. are public domain. Also images from that time is public domain. I did this for Avoid Hitting Piano (my first thought was, that I want to do a game using op. 131 from Beethoven)... anything what is more than 50 years old should be public domain, right?
50? Try closer to 100. Due to successive copyright extensions, practically no work made since the 1920s has, or likely will lapse into the public domain barring a massive sea change in IP laws. Any newer works that are public domain are only there because they've explicitly been released into the public domain, so you're best off looking for those. For sounds I know that Freesound has a large library of user-submitted sounds under an attribution license (i.e. you just have to say where you got it and who made it). The quality can be a mixed bag, but if you're willing to dig you can usually find what you need. For images I'm not as sure - maybe someone else here will have some suggestions. Edit: Also, royalty free != free. Are you looking for stuff for no money, or can you spend a small amount on a one-time license fee? There's not much great quality stuff in the former category, but there's a fair bit more in the latter.
http://www.freesound.org/ has tons of sounds with CC Sampling+ license. It's a great community, and they provide lots of quality stuff. The pictures are much more complicated. You can buy royalty free images from many sites (just google it), and there are sites with Creative Commons licensed images, but these are photos in most cases, so you have to work a lot on them to be ok for a game. Check deviantart, there're many talented folks there who do excellent character designs. Ask them if you can use their artworks. Many people there don't really care who uses their images for what reason. Maybe you can find someone there who'll work for you for revenue share. Good Luck.
I don't know if you would find use for the textures at: http://www.cgtextures.com/ Great resource for textures, as well as inspiration and reference photos.
Public domain is a good suggestion, there are also plenty of other royalty free sources. A favorite source professional sound effects is: http://www.soundrangers.com/ –– You need to pay a small fee per sound effect (similar to iTunes) but there aren't any royalties to pay once you've bought it. They do have a few free sounds too.
For sound, I like these guys (Much cheaper than SoundRangers, and tailored for games specifically) http://www.indiesfx.co.uk/ For music, this guy is fantastic: http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/ I haven't uesd it yet, but have been looking at this site for stock art: http://www.dreamstime.com/
We use Soundsnap too. I think it's about $30 for a 1-month subscription and that gets you 100 downloads. When they don't have what we need, then we record our own. So that means almost a million people have heard *my voice* snickering as Marcus the Mole slyly puts on his mask in our top-selling game, Spazzle. LOL.
SoundSnap/GMP Music For our game, Storm Attack, we also used Soundsnap for almost all of the sfx. Free account gets you 5 sounds a month - $29 gets you 100 sounds or 1-month of use, whichever comes first. That's an important distinction... I think we only downloaded maybe 10-15 sounds before our month was up. Probably should have stocked up We used GMP Music for all our songs. $35/track, with great deals on packages. Full CD's are around $70, with many CD's containing 10+ tracks.
Great info. Definitely gonna check out these sites for sound options. I like how you can listen directly on these websites. Sounds like soundsnap is a pretty good deal (though looks like browsing through sounds can take some time...especially if you don't know what you are looking for). Have any of you guys heard anything about Audiomicro.com? I know it has a lot of music and sound effects, but not sure if any of you have tried it. Doesn't look bad.
Ya I also use freesound.org, unfortunately for images sometimes to get what you really want you just have to pay someone, otherwise you end up with programmer art and we all know that sucks.