Question Assets packs

Hello guys,
I start to look into ready assets for my game but struggle to find anything complete for my project, like this for example is a nice asset with nice elements to create some medieval village:
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/fantasy/rpg-medieval-kingdom-kit-118468

But the problem is when i need more in that style, game will not be only in a village, there should be some underground dungeons, maybe desert or snowy biome but leave those for now and take that dungeone theme for example. So guy have only this asset in this style in own library of assets he provide in the store.

I start to struggle and even start to think this assets purchasing is pointless cause you never match those assets to be consistent unless you purchase Synthy assets like many only to get the "Stolen assets" or "assets flip" label, thats the reality and thats how Steam customers react when they see few games in same style.

So i have a question to those who purchase those assets and even manage to complete entire collection needed for own game, how you manage to do that?

 

You basically explained why artists will never run out of jobs because there is hardly any set of packages suiting an entire game where you won‘t either run out of assets you need or have to compromise on art direction.

The best approach is actually to scour for assets that work well together and make a game out of what you can get and see how far you can go with that.

 

If you do not have the possibility to have an artist work for you (even if its somebody on fiverr.com), your best bet it to downscale the project in such a way that the matching assets you find, do fit well together.
Scaling down is generally not the worst idea for an Indie. Focus on great gameplay and storytelling over visuals

Alternatively aim for highly stylized game style or (relatively highly) realistic style. Those two categories have each the largest range of similar looking assets. For the later you can also look outside the Unity asset store in the various 3D model shops that are out there.

You can also play with shaders and postprocessing to reduce the asset-flip appearance.

Also note that players may give sufficient leeway when only the same type of entity matches in style. The player with its outfits needs to match on itself stylewise, enemies/NPCs etc. need to match to each other and background assets need to match with each other. But you may have a style switch between backgound and NPCs or NPCs and player because those already are conceptually different things.

You can also do fun things like have your character be a dimensional traveler and that's why it looks vastly different from its environment

 

This is a big, fundamental problem when using store-bought assets.

For my current project, I found that you can make assets look a lot more cohesive simply by changing the textures. Especially if your game has a rendering "style" that you can reinforce. Obviously this requires a little time and skill, but still far less than creating your own assets from scratch.

For example, if your game is cartoony, or anime style you can take an asset with a realistic texture and replace with a texture that just has solid colors or a simplified version. Open the albedo map in a paint app and paint-over or filter the islands.

I don't have my project with me, but here is a screen grab from my youtube channel:

I made the character and the room interior myself but I'm also using props from several different asset packs. If I recall, I think the telephone, the lamp, and the book are from the same props pack, but the chair is from a different pack, the curtains are from a different pack, and the plant is even from a different pack.

So, the first thing I did was to replace all of the shaders with the custom softlight shader I made for my game. That made the assets a lot more cohesive just by itself.

In the case of the chair, I left the same texture but I lowered the brightness and contrast so that it looks more like the surroundings. For the potted plant, I put a dark green overlay on the leaves to reduce the overall range of colors. The pot was originally white so I changed the color. The curtains where originally bright lavender, so I replaced that too. For the telephone and the lamp, I think I left the textures mostly the same, but i removed any normal maps or PBR maps that they might have had.

 

One thing to consider is that many assets are just used as a placeholder. Where a lot of changes are expected to be made to them, or they might just be replaced by custom work later in the development cycle (as one of the final steps), where the final artistic direction can be influenced by things like level design and game mechanics chosen and implemented up until then.

While plenty of people use just a few things here and there from their assets as they fit the final style, but very few people use nothing but store assets for their game, with the more common exceptions to that being full-game kits that essentially provide the skeleton of a game.

Obviously this isn't what everyone does, and doesn't answer the real question here, but you can understand why full game art asset packs aren't extremely common. Many game devs don't want to deal with the unfair accusation of asset flipping - which will be common if your entire game's art is from a single kit or set of related kits.

You could ask the people who designed the kits you like if they are willing to make more kits like that - and you could even say, "I could pay you to make the assets, but then you can go and sell them on the asset store once you've made them, in return for me having to pay you a little less for making the asset at my request?"

Food for thought!