One big problem holding devs back from enjoying gamedev is a lack of quality 3D assets. The engine can be wonderful, but mods were successful due to the availability of existing models and textures that they can poach from the parent game.

I’ve been trying to fix this. It’s not quite ready for showing, but whatever: https://github.com/shawwn/noh

I used to work on Heroes of Newerth, a dota clone. The parent company (S2 Games) sold it to Garena, who shut it down last year. In other words, there are ~80 unique characters with wonderful animations that no commercial entity cares about. I offer them to you.

The gamble is that no one will care; Garena is a massive entity focused on the bottom line, and they’re based outside of the US.

The main thing I’d like to do is to get together the names of all the artists that made these cool characters and promote their current work. HoN’s main strength was its graphics and fluidity, which even today some prefer over dota. That was thanks to an incredibly talented art team whose office was based in California, and I had the pleasure of watching them work for six months or so before the devs were relocated to Michigan. I miss them, and I should’ve spent more time learning the tricks of their trade.

I’ve been making a converter from the HoN format to collada, so hopefully this can be a drop-in addition to raylib. Then you can make your own games with characters and props from HoN.

EDIT: the author of raylib is here! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36614060