Making a game with no custom art :(

SO... I'm a programmer - not an artist. I can't draw a straight line to save my life. Last time I tried to model something in 3d, it honestly looked like a 2 year old made something out of legos.

When I decided to make my first game, I knew there was no chance of me being able to do anything other than modify other people's art assets. I can work in photoshop to customize a texture, I can modify a model in blender to tweak things, but that's about the extent of it. My "concept art" looks like a child's drawing on the fridge - and that's on a good day.

Anyway, I've come to terms with the fact that my game will basically be made out of 3rd party art assets with modifications. And I've bought a lot of them. Tons and tons of the best quality, PBR stuff I could find. And I think that my game looks great so far, but I can't shake the feeling that even though I've put hundreds and hundreds (and more hundreds!) of hours into programming my game systems and gameplay over the past year, it still ends up being (visually anyway) something that isn't mine. This is a pretty large scale third person story driven action/adventure game that is going for a very realistic look, so anyone that knows the asset store would probably recognize some things.

Now - I feel like I've used these assets in a unique way - done some modifications, built my own pieces out of the prefabs, etc - but it still feels wrong. I don't have a budget to spend on custom art, and it seems like there are 10 bajillion revenue share projects being posted every day all over the web, so I've never even bothered trying to do something like that.

So opinion time: What do you think about a game that has a totally original story, original music, original gameplay, and original environment/level design, but uses 100% 3rd party licensed assets (with modifications) for the art?

 

Many valued art pieces in this World are not originals but outstanding high quality copies.

 

Industry artists often don't create from scratch. They take an existing asset and convert it to match the style of the game. I've worked on several AAA and indie projects, and this fact is consistent across all of them.

 

I think your view as a developer is very different from a customer's view. He will play the game and it looks nice. He does not care about the art, he might not even know what a 3d model is... So it really does not matter at all. And if someone who knows the art from an asset store sees it, he would most likely rather be amazed about what you did with it in your game.

 

I agree, players don't care.

Count yourself lucky that you were able to find enough off-the-shelf affordable art to pull it off. The big challenge I've run into is finding enough art with styles that don't clash.

 

Sounds like you're concerned about the visuals not being YOURS... but YOU are not the audience or the customer. You have to put that aside and realize the customer does not know YOU and they will not know you even when they buy your game, no matter whether you made the art yourself or not. So, on its own merits, is it good enough/appropriate for the game? Will some stranger who doesn't know who made it, like it? If you really feel the need to get ego acknowledgement for the art then you will have to learn to do art.

 

My experience has been the opposite. We create everything from scratch, even the most trivial elements.

 

Making custom art with no game...

 

Other people may use same stock assets as you. But among them, not everyone will complete a game, and release it. And among those games, few will be popular enough so a substantial amount of players will remember and recognize an asset. And even if that happens, it's not automatically a bad thing. What matters is that your game is fun.

 

Don't need to be an artist to modify a texture or model slightly. Often just a little modification goes a long way to making stock art not so stockish.

 

Thanks for all the great opinions - very encouraging! I've kind of avoided showing anything off from my game so far just because I was afraid that people wouldnt take it seriously since it uses licensed assets. Seems like the majority opinion so far anyway is that most people could care less, so that makes me feel a lot better

Also, it's definitely not an "ego" thing - I know I suck at art and that will never change, so I just try to focus on what I can do.

 

Post a demo in the latest Friday feedback (top of the design forum) & get feedback on mechanics, looks etc. we can all help you with feedback before you face the public.

 

You may make the actual model from scratch, but ATAT, ATST, storm troopers, and everything else in a star wars game has existed for 40 years. If you're saying you didn't use any concept art, and someone just drew an ATAT from memory then mad respect, but I doubt that that actually happened.

 

In the case of existing fiction of course the reference is drawn from source materials, in the case of SWC, it is heavily influenced and styled after RMcQ concept. Even our original characters/planets/vehicles are done to match that. But every piece of art has concepted and created from scratch to match our visual direction.

But the comment that assets are grabbed from other sources and tweaked is something I've never encountered for a large scale project, even when doing original ip. (With the exception of place holder assets). On my last project we actually did try to leverage existing content (marvel), but it was a technical impracticality. With skilled artists it is faster to create new content than to try to adapt existing assets. Every game has its own technical needs, and modifying is almost always more time consuming. Though it is sadly a lesson that is usually learned the hard way.

 

So artists don't maintain a library of base models that they use? I'm only wondering now because I'm not an artist, but as a programmer I try to create code that is reusable to save myself time in the future. If I were an artist, I would think that I would save a library of models to work from. Maybe not specific stuff like ATAT/ATST, but maybe a base human model to start from, and some base trees/rocks/plants, etc.

I'm just curious at this point. I once saw a video about the death of a video effects company (it was posted on this forum a while back). The company did Life of Pi or something. I remember them talking about rendering the ocean and the rain and everything. I thought to myself "No wonder they went out of business if they started from scratch each time." A programmer would never do that. We'd have a library of weather effects, ocean effects, etc. Sure, certain things would have to be created from scratch, but weather/water effects? Seems like a huge waste of time=money.

 

There are some nutcases that think that a game should use original art. Those people should be ignored.

Basically, as long as the game is good, people won't care.

Also, with some effort you can learn to draw and model - if producing custom art is important for you.

As far as I know, they don't.

There's pretty much no reason for an artist to maintain base model library (especially for 2d).

They maintain collections of reference photos, and "inspirational" images, though.

The reason for that is that (2d/3d) art is not programming and has pretty much nothing in common with it. You can't finish serious programming product in 15 hours. You can finish a painting in that time, though.

Check out any speed painting video. A picture always start with rough idea/sketch made of few lines and basic shapes. After that point it is adding details. The thing is the "base idea" for the picture can be sketched in seconds. So you don't NEED a base model. Even in 3d very little will transfer between different projects, because project subject will affect topology/texture/etc.

So assets are not reused.

 

VFX elements are fairly quick quick to create, but the implementation can vary widely. Rain is a good example, we had a couple of levels with rain, but many actual assets depending on location, camera and lod. The base textures were similar but the emitters shaders and meshes/animations were different. There isn't really a one size fits all for most effects, especially in games like ones in the marvel universe where each character has multiple signature attacks. Certainly we share textures whenever possible (for performance reasons), but still all those textures and meshes were original to that game. And a good fx artists can paint that stuff much faster than it would take to look for something that would work.

Models are very similar. Within a game, reuse/repurpose is done where possible. "Grunts" will often have a base model and be modified. But the core design, rig and animation method is often very unique to the game play/style. For example all our units in SWC are pretty useless outside that specific game, they aren't generic resource intensive models like you might find on the asset store. On top of all that, our art direction is very carefully worked out and consistent. An x-wing in our game is very specific to our game and different from others, and they are different from each other.

And though not exactly a necessity, our artists are some of the top in their field, most from AAA, but also from film and tv. Because of the type that achieve that level, they 'own' and are heavily invested in their creations. They aren't the type who take shortcuts, they are more interested in making everything they do a showcase piece. No one wants to repaint or tweak an existing Hulk, they want to make it their own, and look it's absolute best in the context of our game. A model designed for an rts won't look as good in an RPG or fighter. Stuff like that. Even the trival stuff like rocks, barriers and road cones are built specifically for our environments so that everything cohesive.

But as I said, this has been my experience. The studios teams and companies I work for or have worked for place a lot of value on visual quality and consistent art direction. I can't speak for other studios, but most of the folks on my team come from studios or projects that work in a very similar fashion. It's also evident in a lot of higher end games. (Not all, but the pretty ones.).

And certainly we maintain a heavily reusable programmatic framework. We basically overlay unity with a flexible game framework that we use on nearly all our games. (A couple actually). But art is a different beast, especially for us.

 

Everything to an extent is a used idea, but I create all assets and code from scratch, or I should say I have never purchased anything off the asset store, and I use unity's helper scripts, such as third person controller etc.

The other point is when you're creating a game, like someone mentioned before, it's difficult to fit a purchased asset into the game theme, you might want the character to do something else. Sometimes modelling and rigging from scratch is easier than modifying an asset.

Just practice your modeling and art skills.

 

You can get a lot of art for fairly cheap if you understand artists. Eliminate the design portion of it and it costs much much less. And frankly that's good enough for a lot of games. I've worked on games where we did this for major IP games. We had a couple of in house artists that would make some base models set the look and feel, then take it to asian outsourcing companies and say we need these 50 variants,and we would define them in detail, so pretty much no guesswork and they can't say they are charging us for creative design.

Nothing against creative design, but if you don't really need original stuff it's silly to pay for it.

 

Honestly can you really tell a big difference in the art style of most popular games that you know use bespoke art? It doesn't matter except that you like it enough to use it yourself.

 

I don't think there's an issue with using purchased assets, especially if you tweak them a bit to disguise their origin.

That said, don't say you're not an artist. Drawing a straight line isn't a necessary skill because it's something computers are great at doing themselves. You weren't born knowing how to write C#, and you can learn how to make art as well! Granted, there may be a significant time investment that you may deem not worth it, but you still could do it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm the same way. I even tried following along with Blender tutorials and made a teddy bear that ended up looking NOTHING like the one in the video. But I was determined to create my own art for my game, so I stuck with it. I also decided to aim for something considerably more lo-fi in detail and have characters that fall somewhere between Minecraft and Playmobil figures in level of detail, but I've come to love the style. The side effect is that I'll have a lot more work to do, but I'll get that satisfaction of knowing I've created the entire thing myself (which I'll freely admit is a huge ego thing with me).

In summary, you'd be amazed what you can do when you stop telling yourself that you can't!

 

It's fine to use assets available on the store as long as they look like they go together. Studios that get criticized for this kind of thing usually buy several random asset packs that are on discount at some point and then throw them all together. They also use the models in several games.

Might & Magic 7 got some criticism for reusing some assets from previous games. So the issue with using these assets unchanged in a large market is that people may have seen them a few hundred times already.If people really love the art maybe that won't be an issue. Maybe it'll feel like your game is a really in depth standalone mod for whatever it is that used the artwork first

 

Maybe it is just my non-artist viewpoint but honestly I don't think gamers will really notice anything. I mean take a look at mobile or Steam games for example. Other than the different styles of art and trying to compare different genres (which makes little sense) all games look very similar these days anyway. Look at RTS games or platformers or whatever and you'll find most look very much like each other even in the cases where people have labored or spent money on creating completely new artwork. One reason is there are just so many games.

I think there are exceptions of course. If you want to create a unique world populated with strange creatures and such. Or if you are AAA and working with an IP. But for 99% of the games out there they all look basically the same (within their given genre and chosen aesthetic).

 

1. Fall out of love with your game.
2. Draw up a working contract (not a marriage certificate) with your game at your local attorney's office.
3. Enter into a working/business relationship with your game.
4. At this point, using non-original art seems like the most obvious and logical way to get your game shipped this century.
5. Win and profitsss.

 

Not unusual, clicking a point then holding shift and clicking another point will draw a straight line from A to B in most paint applications. Number of videos I see with people trying to draw long straight lines freehand :s To make a curved line use paths instead. Wash, rinse, repeat and you'll be much better in no time.

Per my PM there are probably post processing options and filters that can do a lot to unify your 'look and feel', I would suggest research in this area. Maybe someone else here can comment on that?

 

Thanks for the reply and the pm! I've actually invested a lot in post processing and I think that I have a pretty consistent look and feel - my worries that prompted this thread were more about a fear that the end users (hopefully) playing the game might notice assets that have been in other games and be put off by it. But it seems like I'm headed in the right direction to make sure that won't be a problem.

 

Even just some basic color grading can help a little with that. Like with Amplify Color, Scion, or any of the LUT-based color grading assets.

 

I used to (still have but haven't used it in years) have a repository of pieces of 3D models, for creating in 3D (not sculpting) low poly work. Ultra low poly hands are pretty common and can be edited for stylistic purposes to match a style quicker than (low poly) modeling from scratch the entire hand. Other pieces I used to use were low poly feet, generic low poly shoe, simple human starter head, but since revising my preferred workflow from low to high back to low, - to sculpting to retopo mid/low poly, this limited repository has become useless.
Also the ability to be more liberal with my polygon distribution because polygon counts don't matter as much as they used to, I don't have to meet the 500 triangle count exactly with working hands and articulated face - which allows for a more artist rendition of a hand/face to match more closely the desired look with polygons instead of relying on the texture detail to overcome the limited poly count to match the intended style of the game.

Agree -

Bulls Eye - I have a huge repository of reference images, photos, 2D animation breakdowns, wireframe models, stylized texture examples, lighting, animals, nature, fx, etc etc.

Most artists can't draw a straight line - they use a ruler or click - shift - click.

 

I think generally that it is better to create original art for a game, simply because it will be very difficult to find all the pieces you need in a cohesive style. But there are a lot of things you can do, some shortcuts, others just logical, to help make the process of creating art easier and faster:

• Buy art assets and retexture them. It's incredible how little character an untextured model has. Especially on lower polygon assets, texture is everything that gives a model its style.

• Keep textures as simple as they can be. Buy some decent materials (all maps) - substances are great as you can often change a lot of parameters very easily. If you want to make your own textures, use some software that gives you procedural ones, as they are generally simpler and more versatile than hand-crafted ones, and often at least as good quality. Avoid hand-painting anything onto your textures, it's hard to adapt new ones to the style, requires skill to get right and just adds a lot of time onto your workflow.

• Shortcut as much as possible. If some part of your modelling process adds 50% time but only makes the model look 10% better, cut it out. Hand-painting grunge and dirt (at least for me) fits this category. I just add a little procedural stuff in my favourite texturing software (Substance Designer). As long as your textures have a little grunge and definition in them already, all this edge wear and tear is a little overrated IMO. Getting decent textures (which can easily be bought) is more important.

• Set up a pipeline. Some software (such as Designer) makes it really easy. At the moment for some sci fi assets I'm making, I don't even have to do anything to texture each new model (apart from adding normal detail). I just plug it into a node in Designer and it adds preset materials according to the color IDs of my high poly mesh, and adds little wear and tear procedurally. Bam ready to go. Reuse materials as much as possible to make it easy to control the style.

Don't be afraid to spend a little and get good tools and quality materials. For a solo dev, tools are the rest of the team they wish they had.

 

Every horror film has the same scream sound effect in it.

But then again most of a horror film is original.

My opinion is if it is a character based game, at least the characters need to be original!

 

So in this screenshot you're seeing Sci-Fi guy from Dialogue Asset for Unity, Helicopter and the hanger is from Manufactura K4's Middle East Environment pack, ground textures, trees, snow storm, are all from his Winter Pack.

I don't feel the LEAST bit guilty. When a big studio makes a game how do they do it? 20 to 30 artists, several programmers all march line and step with a game designer's vision. So when you're a one man programmer with Unity, you are wearing several hats! You are usually designer, director, programmer, and artist. As a programmer I'm somewhat weak in art and modeling as you are, so I purchase these packs the same way a triple A studio would pay modelers and artists to create assets. The only difference is, I'm getting them ON THE CHEAP BECAUSE Manufatura K4 doesn't just work for me, he works for YOU TOO. So when both our games become millionaire hits, there's a mathematical chance that people will notice your helicopter in your game looks a LOT like mine, but yours won't have my custom winter camo skin job. And that's OK. Because from our millions we'll be able to hire artists to work for us and us only on our sequals right bro?

TLDR version: You don't have make every single asset in your game for it to be YOUR game. Don't be afraid to use any resource available to you to make your dreams and your vision come true!