I want to make and publish a game. A real game. Something that I can be proud of and other people will enjoy playing. I’ve tried a few times in the past but I always ran into the same problem: I am terrible at creating game assets that you can happily look at for more than two seconds. A solution was needed and I came up with a few ideas:
There are plenty of platforms out there that offer free assets for anyone to download and make games with. Among the more well known platforms are assetstore.unity.com, itch.io/game-assets, kenney.nl, craftpix.net. Well, so, problem fixed, right? No, unfortunately not – at least not for me. The thing with free assets is that you’ll rarely find exactly what you need. What might work is to look at existing free asset packs first and then design your game around it such that you only add content to the game for which you know there is a matching asset. However, that’s not the kind of workflow I am looking for.
The other thing with free assets is that when you start combining assets from various packs and different creators, most of the time the art style of the assets won’t match exactly and your game will quickly look uncanny or even just amateurish.
Allowing yourself to purchase assets definitely increases the amount of available resources and improves the chances of finding assets of matching art styles. But there is of course one caveat: your bank account is not going to like it. Individual assets might be cheap, but most games (even indie games) use hundreds of assets or more. If you only have to pay for the most complicated ones and manage to create the simpler ones yourself this might still be a viable option. For me it’s definitely not the right path, especially when considering that I like to put art into the game fairly early in development and then iterate a lot – buying assets during this iteration process would just waste a lot of money.
The fact that I’m bad at making assets obviously has to do with the fact that I haven’t spent a lot of time learning the required skills. I could change that. I could sit down and actually learn how to make the assets that I need. I’ve started this process quite a few times and it just turned out to never be really all that enjoyable to me and since having fun is one of the main incentives I have for making games, I want to spend as little time as possible doing tasks that I don’t enjoy – which unfortunately includes learning and eventually making those darn assets myself.
Since all the other options of somehow obtaining great assets don’t work for me, there is really only one good option left: just don’t use any (fancy) assets. At first glance this might sound stupid but it is very much possible and has been done countless times in the past. It doesn’t mean that you can’t use anything, it just greatly constraints your options to assets that are essentially trivial to create. For example, you could still use simple shapes (2D or 3D), procedurally generated objects, shaders and pair that with some lighting, post processing, and UI and your options for possible games are becoming quite large again. A popular example is Mini Metro, which gets by with just using lines and shapes and has been purchased far over a million times.
For my path forward I have found an idea that fits option 4: a submarine game with a strong focus on sonar. Aside from UI, the only graphical element in the game will be the sonar itself which I can procedurally generate.
Continue reading to see the development progress of my game Sonar & Silence… →