I want to make a game, but....

I'm 15 years old. Several years ago I was developing poor quality indie games as though it was going to be my job some day. Like anyone else, I aimed WAY to high. Now I am primarily a musician, and doing much better with music than I ever did at games. However, lately I've wanted to make some small, simple games as side projects. VERY simple, the one I currently have in mind is a simple top-down WADS and mouse shooter with pretty 'splosions and stuff. No networking, no voice acting, no fancy graphics.

Fancy graphics.

The problem is, that even though I can hold my own programming a simple game, I simply cannot create the necessary visuals. I need ideas for an art style that I can manage, perhaps something very cartoony? Something that involves a lot of primitives (cubes, spheres, the like) most likely? And how will I deal with particle effects? Also, I have absolutely no budget for this project whatsoever. I cannot buy art assets, and I CERTAINLY can't buy Unity Pro.

So that's my problem. What art style would you suggest for someone who's not an artist?

Thanks in advance,

LilWiebe. (Formerly MTracerStudios)

 

Check out Geometry Wars, it sounds like exactly the direction you're after.

 

There's a couple ways you could go about this...

- Recruit somebody with a talent-share deal - basically, find an artist who also wants to make a game but can't program. You program his game, he makes art for your game, and you come out with two complete games! I'm not sure how this works in practice but it's something I always wanted to do.
- Recruit an artist with a profit-sharing deal - it has a bad reputation around here ("i want to make an mmo but i need programmers and artist. i'll be the idea guy, we'll share the profits!") but it might be the only way to get help and you might be able to give yourself more credibility by showing a playable but ugly demo.
- Just make a game for fun and don't worry about how it looks.

Since this doesn't really answer your question (about art styles), I'll give some more ideas:
- Pixellated and blocky - like Minecraft. 8-bit sprites are really easy to make and they look decent as long as you're consistent.
- Solid-color simple - yet smooth - shapes. I used to think that texture-painting was the solution for my inability to model - but I was wrong. I'm thinking something like Mirror's Edge or QUBE - where everything is clean-looking and familiarly shaped, but pretty much a solid color.
- Billboards! For characters, if not your environment, you can make some sprites that always face the camera and look like they belong, as long as you don't look too closely.

 

If you're able to handle the coding for a simple(r) game, and can make good music for it, that's half the battle if you ask me if not more for a small project.

For art creation, I would *highly* recommend getting an inexpensive drawing tablet such as a Wacom Bamboo or a MonoPrice one (http://www.monoprice.com/products/p...=11303&cs_id=1084101&p_id=6251&seq=1&format=2 ) which has the same tech specs as a high-end Wacom (1024 pressure sensitivity, large area, etc.) and I personally use during production (I have the version with physical hotkeys, but they aren't too useful in my opinion). The monoprice is well-known and is extremely inexpensive ($50 + shipping). I can't stress how important it is to have a good tablet for creating your textures, realistic/cartoon/stylized/otherwise. It also is fantastic for sculpting software. Grab GIMP and Blender to get yourself started, since you don't have much budget and aren't committed yet. Those are free and will give you the bulk of the functionality commercial packages give, albeit (in my opinion) not as polished or productive.

Write a game design document with milestones and tasks for yourself at many steps of the way. Break them down as small as is reasonable for a particular task (e.g. "Create placeholder goal net" is sufficient, you don't need to write in silliness like "launch software, click and make cube" use common sense here). Write out your gameplay goals and the experience you're aiming for the player to have while playing. Compare your work as you go through with these goals and adjust the ones that turn out to not be fun or extraneous to the core gameplay. Make lists of topics you need to research, and their side-topics for reference. Give yourself tasks with priorities, and try to leave alternate things to do at any given priority when possible so you can do something you'll be more in the mood for when needed. Make current to-do lists, next to-do lists, and further-out to-do lists for yourself and keep them updated. Plan as much as possible, and note down things you think will need testing or more knowledge to determine to check against your design goals later.

What I would recommend for now, is creating the prototype and barely-fully-featured version of your game with placeholders (pre-alpha stage, colloquially). Make sure it's fun, use basic shapes like cubes and primitive 3d models you make that approximate what will be needed (no textures, just color them with a material to denote gameplay elements for testing or whatnot, the idea here is to test gameplay and game idea, so spend minimal time on them if you make the textures). Add some sound effects with your instruments and a program such as SFXR for arcade-style synthesis (free).

Once you've determined you're going with your game design, you can start worrying about music, "real" textures and materials, etc. and how to do proper animations for models, along with practicing doing so. I would also recommend a basic GUI system implementation at this stage as that's what will eventually turn your game from a "set of levels" into a game. This would include heads-up display (HUD), score system, linking things into the UI, etc. with placeholder shapes/text for the elements. Tweak the layout as you go and figure out what looks/feels the best, then start putting in more advanced art as you go. Plan out, as above, in your GDD the UI flow with diagrams and mock-up layouts. Think of how someone would progress through your UI and what they would think they should look for next as they're stepping through it. What makes sense to you may not make sense to others who don't already know X is here, Y is there, etc.

Too long, didn't read: To answer your main question more directly and succinctly: get a drawing tablet, practice hand-painted and/or stylized textures, and get a nice production flow going as you learn. Get a set routine for how you create textures and turn that into your pipeline later on. I think you'd be best off with a non-hyper-realistic art style when starting out, as you have complete control of your creation, learn skills you'll want and need, as well as gaining an understanding of overall art design. It also is, for starting out (in my opinion, of course) easier to make something "acceptable" looking in than a realistic style using photographic textures.

Best of luck and keep working on things over time as you figure out what you want to do with yourself once you're done with school !

Edit: Oh, and here's one tidbit of advice that you should think as you're doing this: Your first title is not going to be your magnum opus. Accept this. Don't try to make it so; focus on learning techniques and finishing a project, then another, then another. It's a trip, not a switch where one day you're unskilled and the next you've mastered things finally. Keep your project goals realistic and remember scope; think of how any given feature or game element might affect the project's scope, your abilities, and the gameplay (is there a real benefit to it? will it require tons of extra work for a minor thing that won't really add to the overall experience? will others deem it as near-required? does it fit into the project at all?).

 

The others have summed up the solution really well. I think collaboration rather than hiring someone for the art would be the way to go. If you want to make art on your own, what Dallon said should easy enough to make for a simple game.

IcyPeak_S, your TL;DR could have its own TL;DR

 

I'm not bad at drawing but I couldn't create anything nice, neither pixel-art, vectorial or 3D. After experimenting with many tools I found out that Sculptris, SketchUp, and World Machine are some of the few packages in which I feel comfortable, and now I'm very satisfied with my own arts. I think it's a matter of finding the right tools, you have to experiment with everything until finding what allows you to fully explode your skills. You might even find some hidden talents, like in your case music.

 

Remember that you shouldn't import to Unity from either Sculptris (really high poly count) or Sketchup (various problems. Not a real modeling tool).

 

Of course! I didn't necessarily imply those tools are the only ones you need, but are a good start to create nice art.

In Sculptris there is a tool to reduce the mesh, and you can still use Blender to recreate the model in low polys then apply xNormal to produce the normal mapping. The quality is impressive.

I haven't had problems with SketchUp, and I've seen several detailed levels, mostly reproductions of Silent Hill and Resident Evil in Unity. Not sure what's the problem you mention.

For World Machine you export the different terrain effect maps (erosion, water flow, deposit) and combine them with the color map in GIMP to create a realistic terrain. I learned that from a Cryengine tutorial.

 

The main problem is that any model in SketchUp renders twice as many faces as it needs to, as it always does inside faces but either when exporting to a normal format it asks you if you want to export the inside faces or there is a plugin that makes it ask this.

Also texturing in Sketchup is bad, but this is solved through either exporting it to another application for UV mapping or downloading a plugin for it.

 

Want a no cost solution? Stick with 2D art.

* Inkscape - 2D vector art
* Paint.net - 2D paint program
* Draw by hand (requires a scanner).

My suggestion. Build a game in 8-12 weeks. The SMALLEST possible thing. Finish. Release. Get feedback. Learn. Repeat. At 15, time is your friend. Google 'Deliberate Practice' and then do it!

The key: FINISH SOMETHING.

Gigi

 

Yes. It's always a good idea to touch up your models in a modeling software of at least the caliber of Blender to make sure they are game-ready: UV, face duplication, orphan/duplicated vertices (ugh), fixing normals and much, much more like clutter that x or y software may or may not export along with your model, such as dummy geometry for skeletons on animated meshes.

I add a further step by exporting to .obj if it's a static mesh, checking 'export selection only' and use that exported file in Unity, not the blender file. Not only does this prevent some import issues, it also lets you keep multiple related meshes that may share UV/Textures or geometry in a single .blend file to work on them consistently.

 

I'd look up RageSpline , it cost a bit of money but it seems worth it .

Idk, for something like that I would just ask an artist for the assets . It doesn't seem too complex .

Kudos to you for learning to program young !

 

Wait, art style? Are you talking about textures or cel shaders, things like that?

 

You're a programmer. If you're serious about making games in Unity stick to what you do best and get an artist to handle your visuals.

 

+1
that is what I'd do..

 

I've been working with Blender lately to work on some prototype interior level pieces. I'll add pics to my dev blog soon I think.

Interior level pieces are easy, I usually just take a cube, perform one subdivide such that each face has four subfaces, then remove center vertices as necessary. Apply a texture (after inverting the normals so everything is facing inside!), and let the good times roll.