How do you go about getting resources without funding?

Hey all,

Teenager here who's been doing stuff with Unity (Entering games into competitions) since around 2010.

I went from copy pasting code, to making my own primitive scripts with just if(if(if))) kind of stuff, to producing a full game and entering it in a competition, to where I am now, where I feel very confident in my coding ability.

I have a really great idea for a game and I've been working on it steadily by myself for around a month now.

For the competitions I mentioned earlier, you had to have a team of at least 3 people. Problem with being 17 is that it's extremely hard to find people who have the skills needed for a development team. I had a bunch of people basically sit around and watch me do the whole game, from programming to basic assets.

I cannot 3D model, I do not know anyone who does, and I am neither old enough nor capable of forming some kind of official "development team" with a shared payout and any type of structure.


So my question is, if I'm working by myself, how can I acquire art assets such as textures and 3D models without actually hiring someone/forming a team? Is it possible to commission art assets for use in a commercial game? By this I mean, can I pay someone a 1 time fee to create these assets for me, then profit from them depending on the success of my game?

I have tried learning 3D modeling but I can't pick it up, and there is nobody in my peer group who can do what I need.

 

Of course you can pay people to provide art, music or sound or any other assets. You tell them what you want. Pay what they ask then it is yours to do with as you see fit. Of course, it never hurts to make that expectation clear up front.

 

Not quite 3D models, but two sites that I use to find sounds and textures are Freesound.org and CGTextures.com.

 

For 3D you can probably find a lot of stuff right on the Unity Asset Store. Every time I look for 2D I have seen many excellent 3D models and textures. Seems to be a decent amount of them that are free too.

 

Create a 2D game using simple pixel graphics. That's what most people do in that sort of situation.
Keep making games with super simple art until you're either making enough money to purchase art assets or find someone who can do the art for you.
I'm recommending against doing 3D at all right now, but if you're seriously determined to do it then just focus on figuring out how to create stupidly simple stuff, ala Minecraft-type art.
No map baking, no high-poly. Even avoid using stuff that needs to be rigged and animated if you can.

 

I don't mean to spam... just I went through this same thing so I can relate very much to your post. You'd think by this point (nearly 2015) there would be loads of quality graphics available for free or low prices but it is fairly hard to find.

Anyway check out http://OpenGameArt.org they have a good selection of 2D graphics.
http://OpenClipArt.org has a fairly large selection of free clip art you can use.

Sometimes I seriously consider hiring a couple more artists and starting my own site offering free or low cost game graphics. I have two artists I pay weekly already. If I had a team of 4 to 6 of them I could probably build a great graphics resource in several months time.

It's a serious problem and I am surprised nobody has ever done anything about it. OpenGameArt is a great initiative but a lot of their graphics are super tiny. I guess intended for very low res (mobile?) games. They get better every week though!

The main issue seems like people don't make full sets. Like I can find an animated bat someplace but it would just be flying. So I ended up paying an artist to make hanging upside down, transitioning to flight, flying, being hit, attacking and death animations. That is the kind of stuff we need.

Anyway, maybe after my current game projects are done I will give some serious thought to launching a website providing affordable game art with full animations.

 

...A "serious problem"?
Personally, I think there being massive amounts of free game art would be a serious problem. That takes jobs away from people just to facilitate shovelware.
Imagine you were working at a factory or something, and you got fired because someone else was willing to do your job for free.
No problem there, he only wants to work at the factory as a hobby for fun.

 

It might not be a serious problem for you and maybe a lot of people who are artists. It is a serious problem for people like myself and the OP who are not artists. I think if I make such a site it would hardly put a dent in the market for paid contracted artwork. There will always be a need for it. What it would do is provide a solution to one of the biggest issues in game dev for individual developers... getting art for their games. And somebody has to make the art so the way I see it is a few starving artists out there would be happy to have work. And I am only thinking of 2D art. There are plenty of resources for 3D art. The Asset Store itself has a lot for people into 3D.

 

If I worked at a factory and some kid was willing to do my job for free and that kid was able to match my quality of work, then I should be fired. Nobody is entitled to be paid to work if somebody else is willing to work for less or for free. All you need to do to avoid being fired is offer a level of quality that free workers cannot match or won't match. There will always be a strong market for high quality work, regardless of what is offered for free.

 

You must live in a crappy place! Here in the USA, we have protections to prevent slave labor plus unions to protect employees from predatory firing like that. The kid would at least earn minimum wage and couldn't work as many hours as an adult. Under 16 probably can't even work in a factory.

 

I would love an asset store that focused on full sets, or at least semi-matching pieces, of artwork at a price that is affordable for indie developers.

Yes, this is definitely my biggest complaint with asset stores. Artwork on asset stores is generally acceptable but it is often too mismatched to be used in one project. This limits the asset stores to a last resort.

I don't think he's talking so much about offering free resources as simply offering quality resources at an affordable price for indie developers. Affordable artwork is very limited right now with either having to make it ourselves, regardless of whether or not we're capable of it, or having to live with the often mismatched artwork available on asset stores.

 

I never understand this attitude whenever it comes to graphics. For some reason people expect assets for shaders, state machines, path finding, dialogs, whatever. All of that stuff that could be seen as putting programmers out of work. Yet I never hear anyone say that. It is always when I mention looking for affordable quality art or artists. Or now when mentioning I am seriously considering just making the resource myself. So... what is the difference? If there are tons of pre-programmed assets to save artists time and money why shouldn't there be tons of quality art to save programmers time and money?

 

I guess I don't really feel that for the low budget indie that the programmer looking for art or the artist looking for prepackaged code is really out of balance. The coder looking for art has turbosquid.com, dreamstime.com, all the audio places previously mentioned, fiverr.com (if you want something custom), and many other places. If you are just speaking of the asset stores I would agree but that imbalance (code to art) makes sense since code will usually be tied to an engine, but art isn't. I feel if you add up all the resources out there they are probably on balance, within an indie's budget.

If you're just saying you wish there was more of both out there that is something we all wish for . Based on where we were 5-10 years ago though I'm thrilled at all the choices we have.

 

Well you could block art it worked for minecraft

 

There are some assets. If these sets did better i think more artists would do them. Its also kind of rare that youll find enviroment guys that can do characters+animations (I think).

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/8180
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/19278


https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/11645
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/9246
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/19053
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/10100
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/9390

 

I think you are talking about 3D models. I agree that for 3D models there are a lot more choices available. Like I said...

Try finding animated 2D art for games. Say you want to make a Christmas platform game. Or maybe you want to make a 2D action platformer like the old coin-op Rastan Saga. Or whatever. Every game I have ever set out to make has required a ton of time, energy as well as money just to get some decent graphics. It definitely is way out of balance with the assets available for people looking for help with the programming side compared to those of us looking for help with the graphics side. If you want a tile map engine for a 2D or 3D game a quick search on the Unity Asset Store will find several great options. In fact, nearly anything except some corner cases are available on the Unity Asset Store in either free or very affordable options. Most of the categories on the Asset Store are for various programming-oriented packages. Things people can buy and plug in so they do not need to spend their time designing and programming or paying someone to build the solution for them.

For graphics that is not the case. Especially for 2D graphics. And I doubt there are even as many 3D graphics assets available except maybe for certain genres such as FPS and RPGs.

It is actually quite out-of-balance and I think it is probably the biggest thing remaining as a roadblock to many Indy Developers. Unity itself has helped a lot of people to make games. And then adding in assets from Playmaker to Particle Systems and so forth significantly cut down on the programming skills & time required. Heck there are even kits for Runner Games, FPS and so forth. In fairness they usually do include some graphics. But the point is if you can take care of the graphics on your own you could pretty much focus on that work and use all of these other assets to take you anywhere from 75% to 90% of the way to completion of your game. However, flipping that around, if you can take care of all of the programming yourself you may find enough graphics assets to get 10% to maybe 50% of your game. Unless you are doing some very specific game type such as a FPS for example.

That has certainly been my experience. I'd be very happy to know of other sources of graphics sets. Just basic things, a side on view spider walking, jumping, attacking, reacting to being hurt, dying. A bat, vulture, bee just simple "everyday" things even are nearly impossible to find.

 

I think the distinction that you are alluding to here is not so much 2d vs. 3d as it is with art vs animation (in your examples). You can find plenty of 2d art or 3d models around. What you don't find much of is 2d animation friendly art (or sets as you stated) or 3d models with many animations (you usually only get a few at most and more often just a model). In that one respect I'm not so sure it's the asset store differences that are important but rather the fact that mecanim has made retargetable 3d animations possible so you can remap 3d animation sometimes. In general I agree that well rounded art packages that mix different disciplines (in this example animation and art) are not easy to find.

I would say though that on the artist looking for code side this is also true. You can find playmaker, NGUI, FPS kit, etc. but there will always be some integration needed to make a well rounded game. That integration is going to require coding skills just like the integration of art and animation is going to require different skills.

I think it's safe to say that if you are a programmer (like us) you have to at least become somewhat ok at photoshop/gimp, blender, etc and if you were an artist you're going to have to at least learn to hack together some integration scripts to be able to make a well rounded game (or pay someone). It's always difficult that is for sure but I don't get the feeling that its any easier for artists than it is for us if they are trying to do it alone.

 

I agree with that. There is usually going to be some programming required with Unity. I don't know about using PlayMaker or such things if they eliminate it entirely or not. I know a lot of people supposedly create games with GameMaker with 0 programming.

It could be it is not simpler for an artist in many cases I just don't know. All I know is when I look around I see a ton of assets that package ready-to-use preprogrammed game ready components and yet I have not found even one 2D game ready enemy such as a bat, spider, troll and so forth. That just seems like a very real issue to me.

The more I think about it and especially after this discussion the more I can see just how much of a need there really is for some 2d game ready assets.

I think I will work on it in a few months.

 

Do you think the contrast between good code trending generic and good art trending specific has something to do with it? It's not hard to find one high quality character, animation, environment, or audio composition in the asset store or elsewhere, but to find several of each, all in the same style, is almost impossible.

 

If you do opt to pay for an artist make sure to pay for the content, and not by the hour.

I was perusing some options and one artist I emailed was an entry level artist asking $12/hr. Not bad, right?

But then he sent me back an estimate for ~30 static sprites at around $1,700 and sighting each sprite as around 5 hours of work.

That's what you would call a scam.

 

I wasn't saying asset store distribution of game art was bad. I thought my point was very clear.
My issue is with the idea of giving out a huge range of art completely for free.
In conventional work places, free work like that is flat out illegal, for good reason. In any similar art-based work with a union, like acting, they'd have your neck in a noose for doing that.
It removes potential clients (since they were able to get what they needed for free), it undermines expected rates, and it reduces the quality of assets produced as a whole because professionals cannot afford to put enough time and resources into the work, and more of it is relegated to under-trained, ill-equipped hobbyists.

I don't see that as a scam. Unless the sprites were incredibly simple and with no animations, 5 hours each for an entry-level artist charging only $12/hour sounds completely reasonable.
That's just the way it works; $12 is pretty low, so he clearly was just starting out and not very confident in his abilities. It might seem like a good deal, but logically a less-skilled artist is going to take longer to finish. He even told you he was an "entry level artist".

 

I would argue that finding a high quality state machine (mecanim, playmaker, UE4 blueprints, etc), AI package, physics package, etc. in the asset store or elsewhere is not hard, but to integrate them efficiently is not easy for someone not of a programming background. Your animations will need to talk to physics sometimes. Your GUI will need to react to in game events, etc.

I think with the exception of a few jack of all trades (generalists) human beings do tend to find niches that they like or feel they are good at. Even within programming (GFX programmer, AI programmer, Web programmer, etc) do tend to occur. Scale of size of the program tends to dictate how much people specialize and being indies I'd be careful to over classify programming as becoming more generic. Our scale is small and hence we tend generalize whereas large AAA does not.

Good design patterns (architecture of a program) make plugging in different specific code modules easier but each code module has a specific purpose and usually is not general. The best modules are usually made by someone who specialized in that area of programming or focused on a specific problem.

 

That's what I meant by static; no animations.

No, I'm calling him one based off of his portfolio.

But, I suppose I should say it's more of a "rip-off" than a "scam".

 

Absolutely I get that graphics tend to be more stylized. The code assets are stylized to a degree in that a state machine, physics system, sprite system, AI system, Dialog system etc can be implemented in various ways. Some simpler perhaps with less features and others more complex perhaps offering more features. Different implementations. I see this as kind of the mirror to different art styles. Cartoony and simplistic or detailed and perhaps even kind of photo realistic.

My main point I guess is that at this point in time nearly 2015 I find it surprising that it is nearly impossible to find even one fully animated 2D enemy asset such as a bee or bat or spider or orc or whatever. The reason I selected those for an example is they are pretty commonplace in games. Think of all of the games made over the past 20 years.

It just seems to me if we have multiple physics, AI, GUI, Dialog, Sprite, Tile, Terrain, Character controllers and other plug n play systems easily found then we should also have easy to find animated assets.

If a person searches for any of those code-based assets they will find several of each nearly instantly. Literally seconds of sesrching. Try the same search for art-based assets just pick some character, enemy etc and do a search and see how long it takes to decide there are none.

 

I think the problem is that 2D art just doesn't sell very well. Far as I can tell, the Unity Asset Store doesn't even have any sections dedicated to 2D.
I think the reason is that it's too simple to create compared to 3D, and there's so much less technical knowledge involved in getting it to work. A programmer without an artist can easily just create some simple, ugly sprites to get the game working if they don't mind the way it looks. And that's often the way it goes.

 

Good luck getting any protection at all as a freelance dev/artist/musician/film efx/video shooter-editor. Most of the professions have studios that use "interns" i.e near slave labor..or 40+ hours a week for a pat on the back and a hamburger with extra cheese.

 

You would be a joy to work for. You don't just go out and become an artist in one week. It takes years of hard unpaid work to get your chops in order. You do not mention the style of sprites or the size or genre. I am a pro for 35+ years and it could easily take me a day to produce a high quality, well detailed 2.5D looking sprite of a armored warrior. Why? Because you rarely ever get it right to your trained artist eye on the first run.. That is the base sketch that is refined, erased from, added to and recolored. That is what you pay for. And believe it or not..pixel sprites are a royal pain because you are really faking it hard with details. And I know types like you. They say they want yadda yadaa. You give them yadda yadda and of course then that is when the real work starts..change this, change that, change the other, make it female instead of male and at your fixed price you moan about..

 

Maybe for a skilled artist it is easy much the same as for a skilled programmer making a state machine, physics or other system is fairly straightforward. But I don't know if I'd say making 2D animation is easier. I think 2D artists are awesomely skilled to be honest. And where a 3D modeler can work on geometry and then rig and animate the model fairly easy the 2D artist has to literally redraw the image frame by frame. I think that would be as much or perhaps even more work than making a 3d animated character. Also the 3D model can be used from side view, top down view, isometric view simply by changing the camera position or rotating the model. Again the 2D artist would need to completely redraw the images for the animation in the new perspective.

Yes there is no dedicated 2D category on the Asset Store. 2D stuff is lumped in with textures or something like that.

 

That's true even in programming. The companies I worked for often hire summer interns at minimum wage or sometimes they just volunteer for the experience. Heck at one point long ago I volunteered for 3 months as a programmer. Lots of work. 0 pay. But you do what you have to. In hindsight it was a tiny sacrifice to make to launch my career.

 

I'm saying the problem is in knowing how to do it.
Any developer knows how to make a sprite, and even how they're animated. Knowing the steps to create a model with proper topology, creating a proper UV map that doesn't cause texture deformation, getting all the face normals set up properly, baking out clean texture maps, rigging it, creating animations with said rig, and exporting them into the engine is something else entirely.

 

I see what you're saying. I guess I see that as the mechanics kind of the fundamentals involved. It's like knowing how to write if (something) in programming or knowing i need a blank canvas in a paint program, selecting a palette, brush size and so forth. In all of those cases knowing the "how to" as far as the basic steps is very different from being able to create a nice animated model, program an AI system or draw a well animated sprite.

 

I didn't say it had to look good. More often then not, it doesn't. The issue is being able to do it at all.
Most Indies are fine with just using "programmer art", because they can't afford professional assets.
For myself, I was able to get simple sprites in a game within maybe half an hour the first time I tried.
My first attempt at getting a functional 3D asset in game, on the other hand, took weeks. And I'm talking environment props; no rigging/animation.

 

Out of those assets, the only ones that might be worth considering would be the Kill Zombies packs simply because they give you enough content to make a complete game. Remaining assets feel too incomplete or incompatible.

 

I'm funding things out of my own pocket, from my day job. Careful purchasing of assets and tools.

That said, i've also learned a wide skillbase in coding, design, modelling, texturing/photoshop, animation, and even a little rudimentary audio editing. so i do almost everything myself.

There is literally nothing i cannot do, but there are many things i can't do as well as a specialist can, and sometimes i pay for their work instead of making lesser version myself.

 

heres another cool game that doesnt use any real art or textures.

 

From my experience.. hiring extra programmers is cheaper than hiring artists.

If you can come up with TONS of concept renderings and art, then you can get a kickstarter going. You don't "have" to have game play, just use art as your main weapon.

Also, go to a local college. Ask if you can get some eager students to help you out! Trust me, those students are MORE THAN HAPPY to work for free. After all, they need to exp and the portfolio. I've had the most luck with community colleges and, believe it or not, Catholic colleges lol.

When I was doing drafting and design, I lost count on how many people my prof sent to me for concept renders and solid models for printing. Did them all free. Helped me get a job later on.

 

Nice!
But what exactly do you pay for that you can't do well?
Custom made models for your game?

 

Woah...
Easy there turbo, why so raw?

I'm sorry if my original post didn't properly convay it, but there is no way what I was asking for should take 5 hours each.

 

so far, lower level code for stuff like mesh processing, and mature/polished tools for various tasks that would take months to write for myself. I bought Bitmap2Material, for example.

I could probably do anything, even to any standard, if i spent enough time on it. but quite often a few bucks is a lot less to do than spending so much time. Right now i do my own models, and that probably wont change muich, although i might buy some especially high quality pieces that catch my eye. But in the vein of modelling, what i'm considering right now is things like city building kits. Buildings and urban structures are ridiculously easy to do, but still time consuming.

also considering purchase of certain particle effect packs that i find to be of especially high quality. i've worked with particles before, but i'm sure unity's system is more complex and it'd take a while to adapt,. having good examples to reverse engineer would be helpful.

 

You don't like his quote don't get it from him. You labeling him a ripoff/scam is denigrating to my fellow artists. They know what time they put in prior to getting any compensation from anybody. Who are you to determine how long his work takes. He may have been meticulous but you expect minimum wage prices..yet you had interest enough in his style apparently to begin negotiations with him/her. You ever try drawing with a mouse? It ain't pen and paper and it ain't oils. I can do things with pencil and paper or oils and brush that takes one tenth the time of a mouse drawn version and will be better in line and light and shadow. Computers do gradients far faster than you can by hand, even with an airbrush..but accurate lines..no.. and vectors don't cut it for getting that hand drawn look. You have to use the brush and eraser over and over to get the proper line widths along a curve..or spend several grand on a Wacom. And..you want original art, the copyright to it and expect to make money down the line with these art assets. Pay the piper or spend the years in the trenches training your eye and hand. If you are a programmer have you ever had a client ask for a "simple" AI or custom camera and navigation script or similar and expect that because it is only a few hundred lines of code you can type that up as fast as you can write an email of several hundred lines and hence should only get paid the equivalent of two hours of your time? 30 sprites at two accepted by the client per day takes 15 days. 15 into 1700 is a mere 113.33 a day for a 10 hour workday. That hardly is enough to pay rent, bills and groceries in the US and you could do better flipping burgers as at least you would get overtime pay.

 

Just curious, do you use a mouse to draw non-vector based variable width lines? that sounds like a nightmare

 

That is exactly my view on it. If I actually sit down and focus and take time I have made some fairly good graphics. And I spent many years doing 3D modeling in Anim8or and then a few more years in Blender. And same for music and sounds. I can make decent assets but damn the time required is just too much. A skilled artist & animator will knock out a sprite animation very quickly and have it look excellent. Not all of them are so fast. Some do take a long time and I think that is a big part of why their stuff looks so good. But the artists I work with are very fast. Like I asked for a 2D spider with 4 or 5 animations. First I always ask for them to make only one image so wasted time is minimal. She sent over one image and I had just a few tiny changes. A few days later she sent over the full set of animation frames and even animated gifs so I could see them in action. I could use reference images and make a spider but to make one a good quality would take many hours. Days to do those animations and it still would not look as cool as hers does.

So, I agree a person needs to be able to do it all but time-wise there is just no way I can do it all. I cannot see sitting working on something like an animated character for days one end. I'd rather be programming and actually making the game. Not that graphics aren't part of making the game just saying without actually programming it all there is no game and just a bunch of graphics sitting on a hard drive. So yes it is definitely worth spending the money and having someone who is an artist do the graphics.

 

Yes.. and it is a pain in the wrist. The erase tool is used with the same precision as the mouse to get the variable width. Frankly it is quicker for me to rig and animate and then use C4D Sketch and Toon to get the line and shading tweaked, add lighting and shadows that are correct and then i can run animations for whatever angle I want and as many sizes as I want. Here are some examples of mouse painting that would not make good use of 3D and take much longer I did when I was Ron Paul grassroots whip and sick for a week....

 

...You don't use a tablet?

 

definitely agree with this. i recently spent a week making a detailed character, and i was getting a little burnt out by the end, and just itching to get back to coding.

 

No.. Wish I could afford one..but everytime I start to get ahead of the game I get a car repair bill or a client whose one week contact gets delayed and stretched because they are unresponsive or I seek new contracts and the client will have to wade through the emails and bids of hundreds of amateurs noise I have to penetrate..

 

Any tablet is better than a mouse. You can get one for ~$45 off Amazon easy, if you don't mind it being used/refurbished. Wacom Bamboos are cheap as hell.

 

I had a small 10 or 12 inch one a few years back and a larger one a few years before that. I could mouse paint quicker than all the fussy navigation to get this and that palette and it was useless to me in C4D. I want a Wacom with a screen. I have had the others and again..I am quicker with just a mouse. I have been at it since 1992 so I have a knack for it..

 

What burns me out is the weighting and UV mapping. ZBrush does a great job with it's plugin except on faces which it likes to split the mouth and cheeks of regardless of protection and attraction painting so I always seem to have to UV map in Zbrush to get the best poly to pixel ratio and then back to C4D to rejoin the split face and then back to ZBrush and use the current seams to regenerate.

 

I have a generic one made by a company called LaPaz, or something like that. It was really cheap and suits my purposes well. Although unless I'm tracing something, or doing something else that needs a high degree of precision, I'm usually too lazy to take it out and plug it in. Most of the time I can do it with the mouse quicker than it would take to get the tablet out. When I do need it though, it is invaluable. One of those really expensive Wacoms with the big screen built in would be super awesome though.