Asset store artwork

Was thinking of putting some 2D artwork together for the asset store and wanted to gauge what people are after. Do many of you buy art from the store and if so what do you tend to go for or find lacking? Are there particular things you have trouble finding or would want more of or have an interest in? How about tilemap art?

thanks

 

Yeah, the Asset store could use a lot more of 2D art: sprites, tilesets and portraits.

If you manage to create art that is charming but generic enough to use in several projects it could sell good, I think.

In my case, I've always liked the assets that come with RPG Maker but they are tied to their engine so maybe there's a market opportunity with similar assets.

 

I'm after high qualify cartoons of fruits, vegetables, cars, trucks, trains, planes, people dressed for professions, terrains (simplified cartoon drawings of mountain(s) for example), animals (as well as pets: dogs cats mostly) -

- and I want them done with a transparent background so I could easily turn them into flash cards.

I want them done in a style you'd expect to see done for children 12 years old or less.

That's a lot of cartoon drawings and a lot of work but you know most of the market is going for the 'popular genres' on iOS Android - you need to differentiate.

And if you decide to do this, PM me so I can buy when it's in the Asset Store.

 

I have a 2d food pack in the store, that contains some fruits and vegetables. Link

 

Yes, I really like that style and I came within a hair of buying it but I had already bought a 3 sets of 3D foods from one asset store seller, I forget the name. I need something, for lack of better 'terseness', like a pack of cartoon flash cards with transparent background you'd buy at your University book store say if you were a beginner in learning a new language in that same pleasing cartoon style. If it was enough entries, without being an unabridged dictionary, it'd be worth more than $10 of course. To say that many others would use such an asset I think is a safe bet.

 

Thanks, I'll have a look at the RPG maker assets. What do you mean by portraits?

So accentuated shapes, simple detailing, softened lines, bold colours, that sort thing. I'm assuming you're after a good representation of the item rather than a particular perspective.

 

Yes, you could almost, but not quite, use photographs and the correct filters in Gimp or Photoshop to produce such work when it's something like food. That doesn't work too well though on people, animals, and vehicles though. At least I'm not a fan of that look, I prefer in those cartoons a pleasing element of caricature be introduced.

 

Portraits = faces. Usually RPGs have portraits for their characters. Now maybe this could be too specific to be sold in the Asset Store, I don't know.

 

oh right, literally character portraits. I'll make a note of it, thanks.

 

That probably is too specific but if you are good at caricatures you could do caricatures of famous folk: Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Bruce Lee - you are limited because truly recognizable famous people world wide are rare and of not much help in a game unless you are making a game where the object is to identify famous people. Most I wouldn't recognize if I saw them in person.

 

yea, can't see a huge demand for just portraits. Bit of a specialist thing and quite time consuming.

 

You could do portraits but have them in PSD format, then have loads of parts of a character in layers, allowing the purchaser to kind of design their character from them.

 

Off the top of my head:

Making characters using something like smooth moves would be awesome! And I think for artists the parts/pieces aren't that difficult. If you made 1 rig and animated it you could reskin to make many styles.

Cartoony menu background elements that people could composite together to create their own style....

Seamless hand painted textures (there's a lot but I only like a couple artist's versions like this guy https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/publisher/3375), if you can make nice looking textures you can use that as a seed to generate seamless textures with pixplant2 plugin for photoshop. You can tweak settings, or hit re-seed to generate variations from the same texture that tiles perfectly....

Icons for common pickup items/consumables/ingredients/food.....

2.5d tilesets...

Animals, domestic and farm animals,

 

Other than platform level construction kits no one buys 2D art from the asset store. I have assets ranked 3rd grossing in 2D characters and 6th grossing in 2D iso tiles. To get those numbers those assets have sold 1 copy and 3 copies this month respectively.

I had artists lined up for a whole heap of 2D art assets, but have decided not to proceed. It seems code assets are significantly more viable.

 

As far as making non-famous caricatures of people I know of several sources for good ones, reasonably priced in 2D already. If you made the basic male female and 'professional clothing' that could be swapped out that would be sufficient. For 2D apps to animate you basically need to look at the points of a compass and draw from those angles and let the 'boning' and 'deformation' tools do the rest.

What I'm talking about though is simple background and 'flash' card illustrations. And if you were to do my suggestion I'd do the people/professions 2D cartoon last and the caricatured food, animals, and a small set of 'professional' (i.e. police, fire, ambulance) vehicles 1st. It's actually a lot of work to do those and you'd want to list them as more then 2D art for 2D games. They are also practical as background for reducing polygon count in toon style 3D games: e.g. stadium or crowd scenes. They are also practical to illustrate dictionary games and such.

I wouldn't make more brick, grass, and such textures. There are so many already.

One visit to an online 2D clipart and photography site will validate there is a market for good art. And if you're not a quick and skilled 2D digital artist I wouldn't proceed unless you are up to using such a task to train yourself.

 

I think its even harder to compete in that space, there's a million and one stock/clipart/icon sites. But regardless I was simply pointing out that the volume of sales required to move up the charts in these areas is tiny, or in other words there's not many sales in these categories.

 

I wasn't referring to your assets but those clip art sites are hard to search and very expensive. I did notice PD 2D clipart of cartoon animals that someone had turned into flat 3D assets in the asset store.

As I said though, unless you are really proficient or really enthusiastic about teaching yourself digital cartooning the OP probably would be better served making a game if they were inspired to do something that might make more money, although that market is much more oversaturated.

I am not one to say what will or won't be successful, I've only stated what I'd like that isn't present in the Asset Store.

 

interesting idea, will think about that one

smooth moves compatible characters and custom menu items sounds good. Not sure about textures because there are just so many already available, unless people think they're not suited to 2D mobile games?

Like the idea of iso tilesets, always seems to be enthusiasm for building tilemap games.

This has been my main concern and I was hoping somebody like yourself would give an insight in to sales numbers. Is one of your assets the fantasy buildings, they're pretty nice.

What sites do you use for art out of interest?

 

It lacks 2D graphics. With the new 2D feature they will surely come in handy!

 

Well I've bought from Cartoon Solutions and those are easily repurposed but only for use in a game not for resale. You can also easily make your own in Anime Studio Pro.

 

I am looking for not-too-cartooney, sci-fi outfit items and character portraits. Sure those are often game-specific, but I firmly believe that it can be generic to a large degree.

When I mean outfit items I mean stuff like shield batteries, fuel rechargers, rocket mounts, laser turrets, alien weaponry, cloaking device, armor plating etc.

Unit portraits is stuff like the portrait of a fighter pilot, a merchant, a fleet general, captain of a science vessel, alien race portraits etc. Imagine someone photographed from the front, shoulder up. Propably some protective gear in their face.

That's something I am looking for and I can't really find it on the Asset Store. I wouldn't buy from somewhere else, by the way.

 

It's a big concern and as mentioned the sales are very low. Excluding when I got in on a 24 hour sale the fantasy buildings have sold around 10 copies in 3 months.

 

UI artwork that can be used for NGUI UIs that isn't sci-fi or fantasy oriented. Modern or Apocalyptic/horror themed.

In fact pretty much any asset that isn't fantasy themed. There's so many fantasy oriented assets on the store.

 

..

 

Just curious to know where people go for stuff, wouldn't copy any of it. Will have to check out Anime studio, normally use something else for the odd bits of animation.

So something a little more graphic novel than cartoon strip.

I wonder if it's because people don't think of the asset store as a place for 2D art?

Tell me about it, fantasy always seems to be quite popular. Can't move for wizards and swords.