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Yacht Club Games has released all of their art assets for their indie hit Shovel Knight today under the Creative Commons License, including animations, backgrounds, menus, and more. All the files are "in the state [Yacht Club Games] are used to working with" and can be opened with the illustration and animation software they use, Pro Motion NG. The Creative Commons license allows you to redistribute the content or, more importantly, "remix, transform, and build upon the material" in any way for your own work, as long as you give proper credit, note any changes, and don't release it for commercial purposes. (A more detailed breakdown of the Creative Commons License can be found here.)

The move was reportedly inspired by a photo the team saw way back in 2013, during the Shovel Knight Kickstarter, of a developer using their sprites as a reference for their own work. Wishing to be able to inspire and enable future developers, the team has decided to release their art assets for all to play with.

Source
Shovel Knight art asset repository

 

[slaphappygamer]

Wonder if Nintendo will shut down fan games made from these. If only we new someone that has an uncle that works at Nintendo, maybe then, we can find out.

 

[Osha]

Wonder if Nintendo will shut down fan games made from these. If only we new someone that has an uncle that works at Nintendo, maybe then, we can find out.

Why would Nintendo have any say in this ? They don't own any kind of rights to Shovel Knight.

 

[AngryCinnabon]

This is crazy, in a good way of course! massive props to Yacht Club for being such a great company in general!

 

[gaga941021]

?
Or at least
No. You could do all that but you would also have to attribute the artwork to the company and note any changes you made to it. At that point you would be free and clear it seems to have your own code implementation of the shovel knight game not sold commercially.

I was being sarcastic, since the answer to the original question was literally in the original post.

 

[johnDoe11718]

I wonder what the developers did with the game, because eventually, there are some leftovers sitting around in the assets.