Best practices to deffer artistic asset requirments

I am a coder, I can't create, edit, or compose artistic assets to save my life. I'm not far enough into the project to get artistic team members.

Does anyone have advice for the best way to utilize placeholder assets such that the conversion at the end will be as painless as possible?

Asset types and planned method to defer the necessity for quality:
1) Music - Seems pretty strait forward, I'll find/create a very simple sound track asset, likely an very quiet no intrusive track. I'll copy/rename this track for each specific track I'll need later. When the real track is determined, simply copy it over and re-import.

2) Sound FX - Slightly less strait forward, but very similar, create a quiet non-intrusive beeping sound. Copy/Rename it for each required sound effect. Overwrite/re-import when final sounds determined.

3) Partical Fx/Shaders - I have no ideas on how to do this so the transition is painless. Is someone skilled in partical effects generally also skilled in shaders or are they separate skill sets?

4) Animations - I currently plan on each entity having a single frame static sprite (it's 2d). I believe that later when animations are added it shouldn't really matter what the sprite is correct? The animation component rendering overrides the sprite renderer when rendering the scene right?

5) Tiles - I am creating a white tile with a black border with the name of the tile at the bottom. When the final tiles are determined it should again be a simple as overwrite/re-import right?

5) GUI - Is Unities GUIStyle as easy to re-skin as it sounds? Currently I am doing creating the gui through GUI.Box/ Gui.xyz, will I regret this later?

Have I forgotten any other class of artistic asset I may need? Has anyone been in a similar situation who could point out some "gotchas" they wish they had thought about before hand?

 

Sounds like you're on the right track. My only comment is don't use Unity's GUI system since it has horrible performance. Also I question the flexibility of it in regards to swapping graphics later. Instead I suggest you just build a GUI by creating sprites and then make them clickable by attaching a Collider2D to them. Then attach a script to them that detects user click events (aka mouse events)...
http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/ScriptReference/MonoBehaviour.OnMouseUpAsButton.html

 

Hey Kurius, is there a 2D component like GUIText that isn't GUI? I don't want to generate all my text as textures...

 

I use the 2Dtoolkit plugin for my GUI and text...http://www.unikronsoftware.com/2dtoolkit/docs/latest/html/classtk2d_text_mesh.html

However that might be the same as using this...
http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Components/class-TextMesh.html

 

@Pyrian: I am worried about the same thing. Buttons, check boxes, Menus etc might not be too difficult to roll your own.. but text boxes/Scrollable windows/ etc might be a pretty tall order.

NGUI seems pretty popular, but it's nearly a hundred dollars. It looks like it might be worth the money though as it has a wysiwyg gui editor...
2DToolkit also looks pretty well done but is also expensive, and comes packaged with quite a few features I don't want bundled together.

Both of these assets might be great for a second game, but in the same way I can't currently afford the artistic talent I can't afford the GUI cost... I suppose $50-$100 dollars is a fair price for the functionality provided, but I'm just not deep enough into the process to justify the expense.

GLUe is free, but it says it doesn't support unity free.
Does anyone know of a serviceable free asset package that can handle Widgets/Layouts/Skinning that can be used by unity free license version?


*EDIT*
http://www.tasharen.com/?page_id=140
NGUI has a free version. It's the older 2.something or other but it's likely among the best free options.

 

You'll have to learn some art stuff, even then unless you colab from the start I'm sure it will need edited no matter what you do.

 

you can use orthello 2d for gui and text and its free