Quality vs. Originality

[CloseRange]

I'm willing to admit I am a horrible drawer. I have been practicing for many years and I have quite frankly given up trying to get good at it.
My question is simple, some people will get angry at designers who use bought assets, but is that small number worth it if the quality of a game is greatly increased because you used actually good art?

 

[ajan-ko]

Nobody really care about how a product been made, but what it does.

Look at "I wanna be the guy".

 

[matharoo]

If the asset is popular or cheap, some people may notice since it would be more widely used, but still not a big issue if the game is good. If the asset isn't easy to find or is costly, then there would be less games with the same graphics, so that would work out better.

It's totally okay to buy assets if you can't draw yourself or can't hire an artist. That's why they exist!

 

[11clock]

Nobody really care about how a product been made, but what it does.

Look at "I wanna be the guy".

Please don’t use one of the worst games ever designed as a good example for anything. It isn’t even a product, or else the developer would have been sued to the ground.

You shouldn’t buy premade assets, and make your own, or hire an artist to do the work. Custom assets are fine as placeholders, but get them out by the time you make promotional material.

I am also terrible at art, but I make my own anyways because I don’t want my game looking like 20 billion others on the Steam store.

 

[Widget]

My question is simple, some people will get angry at designers who use bought assets, but is that small number worth it if the quality of a game is greatly increased because you used actually good art?

The gameplay better be god damn amazing if you think its quality improves because you used pre-made assets.

Gonna be honest here, pre-made assets is like an anti-mark of quality, everything I've seen that uses them are terrible. Most of these are low-effort Unity games, or asset flips.

 

[ajan-ko]

Please don’t use one of the worst games ever designed as a good example for anything. It isn’t even a product, or else the developer would have been sued to the ground.

You shouldn’t buy custom assets, and make your own, or hire an artist to do the work. Custom assets are fine as placeholders, but get them out by the time you make promotional material.

I am also terrible at art, but I make my own anyways because I don’t want my game looking like 20 billion others on the Steam store.

Yes, you should buy assets or hire artist if you don't have time and skill to create art.
Being unique not always limited to art.

 

[MGSting]

Well there's always spriters-resource where you can use ripped 2d sprites. I don't think those sprites would put you in danger of being sued. If they did, the fangame Mothertale that uses sprites from Mother 3 would have been taken down a long time ago

 

[ajan-ko]

Well there's always spriters-resource where you can use ripped 2d sprites. I don't think those sprites would put you in danger of being sued. If they did, the fangame Mothertale that uses sprites from Mother 3 would have been taken down a long time ago

Actually, you can be sued, but my point is using others sprite is a legit strategy, as long as you pay the price.

 

[Toque]

Assets off the shelf are generally good quality and cheap. Go ahead and use them.

You can always come back and change them if you want.

They are way better than coder art.

I wouldn’t use ripped art.


If the game is bad, custom art isn’t going to save the game. Waste of money.

 

[deem93]

You can always consider buying pre-made assets and altering them later, to fit your vision and to differentiate them from the original version.

 

[Psycho_666]

Honestly nobody cares...
The issue isn't that you use premade assets. The issue is how you use premade assets.
I know I'm gonna beat a dead horse, but look at Jim Sterling's videos. He constantly goes on and on about asset flips, and hmthe issue there ain't the asset. It's the use. A cartoon lion is walking around in a realistic looking world, there are flat shaded zombies next to cell shaded police officer near a realistic trees.
If there is artistic cohesion, everything looks like it's from the same game, everything looks like it belongs together, nothing sticks out as our of place, then people won't care if you bought premade assets or not, and those who do can go love themselves in the lower back.
As is widely known, a large part of PUBG is bought premade assets, but it doesn't matter, because it looks and feels like PUBG...

 

[sitebender]

Most people won't even notice when someone buys assets... until a famous Youtuber notices.

 

[MagnumVulcanos]

Your game can look like this:

Spoiler: pic

When you use a generic looking asset like this:

Spoiler: pic

In short, people dislike assets that they've seen before.
However, who says you HAVE to draw assets yourself?
You shouldn't draw your graphics if you can't draw, rather, you should do something else, like using abstract simbolic graphics for a pure gameplay game, here's an example:

Spoiler: pic

There's a way to imitate this set of graphics without the use of shaders OR drawing.
-Draw a set of lines or a geometric shape.
-Do this in white color, so as to color it later in-engine.
With paint.net:
-Use the sharpen effect to bring out more "liney" lines.
-Add a glow effect to it to imitate neon.
With GMS:
-use draw_sprite_ext and add color to your sprite.

You only need to know what you can do with a set of tools to get almost professional looking graphics.

 

[Toque]

Use the very best art you can make or afford on your budget.

Keep in mind people don’t eat food that looks bad. Games are kind of the same.


If I have five bucks. McDonald’s.

If I have 20$ Art budget I buy an art pack.

 

[Danei]

I would say there's nothing wrong with using professional assets (or even free assets--you should check out opengameart.org if you haven't already), but using them in an aesthetically pleasing manner is key, as others have mentioned. It can be very difficult to combine images from multiple artists, for example, and maintain artistic cohesiveness. But, as long as you have full rights over the use of the images, you can potentially alter them to fit better with each other.

On the other hand, there is something satisfying about creating your own graphics, even if they aren't of high "artistic quality". You can to some extent design the game's art direction around your own artistic limitations. Personally, I stick to fairly low-res pixel art, because I have no compositional sense and can only produce sprites by shuffling pixels around individually until it coalesces into something resembling an image. But I'm also only designing 2d 8-bit-era-style games, so it's fine.

 

[Yal]

The gameplay better be god damn amazing if you think its quality improves because you used pre-made assets.

Gonna be honest here, pre-made assets is like an anti-mark of quality, everything I've seen that uses them are terrible. Most of these are low-effort Unity games, or asset flips.

The two main reasons games using pre-made assets look crap are as follows:

• The game designer didn't want to make an effort at all and just slapped premade stuff together without caring about quality.
• The game designer didn't make sure assets matched up and worked together, either because they didn't have the artistic skill or because they didn't have anything better to use in place of those assets.

When someone actually puts the effort in, you won't even notice whether assets are custom or generic. You only notice stock stuff when it sticks out. I used a bunch of stock assets in my current project, because it's impractical for me to record the sounds a real sword or gun makes (I don't even have access to a sword or a gun), but that doesn't make the game an asset flip. Most of the assets are custom - I only got stock assets for things I couldn't easily make myself.

 

[RangerX]

I don't want to be the one to piss on the party but honestly, those questions should come later. How many games did you make and released?
Start by making a game. Worry about this later.