All of that wonderful art should be put to good use

[GarBenjamin]

Not sure about the rest of you but I have searched and browsed the asset store many times looking for 2D art. Because I know there is a huge amount of art just sitting up there. And if I could simply buy some art and “plug it in” I’d gladly do that. Because that would save a lot of time. And, in my case at least, it would also result in a better looking game at the same time. That’s two benefits for the price of one. At least that is the potential of using the Asset Store.

In practice it has never worked out that way. Because I’d spend so much time searching and browsing to find assets for the game I had in my head that I ended up either burnt-out and just forgot about the game completely or just knocking out graphics very quickly myself.

Last night I decided to focus on this problem. My plan was to browse all of the 2D assets. Check each and every one out. Eliminate everything that I could (generally because quality is lower than I could knock out in a few minutes OR stuff that is just so bizarre I’d never use it). And then I’d document the link to each asset that remained on this pruned list of assets. And then I’d categorize them all into buckets such as Side-view/Platformer/Infinite Runner/Beatemup Style, Top down / Isometric / RPG, Shmup and so forth. And further break the down beneath each of those categories into Ultra Low Res Pixel Art, Pixel Art, HD Art and Superior HD Art (for the best of the best… there are some asset packs out there with trully phenomenal art).

And then finally, I would review them all again within each of these sub categories and group them into Sets of assets that can be used together.

I figured if I was spending all of this time doing this work… to see what all is really out there… and how usable it really is… I might as well just share the results of all of my work here so others can benefit from it as well.

That’s the purpose of this thread.

Of course, I may find out… there really is not enough cohesive 2D art to build any game of any substance.

---

So far I have cateogorized 200 of the 297 assets that made it through my pruning process.

One thing that really stands out is that for 2D art there seems to be a lot more art… like 20 TIMES or so as much art… for platformer / Infinite Runner / Sideview style games than there is anything else. Oh did I mention I pruned all puzzle gem type of games? I did that.

Of the 200 hundred assets I have categorized so far these are the best of the best for raw art quality IMO… in no particular order. When I say best of the best I mean for the HD style art.

2D Hand Painted Dark Fantasy


2D Winter Snow Platformer

2D Art Pack HD

And for characters
2D Cartoon Character Animation

2D Cartoon Planes (not saying any of this stuff is really usable and certainly doesn’t all go together… just saying what stands out to me so far)

I still have 97 assets to categorize on my list. It is entirely possible there are some just as good or better yet to come.

Still this is just showing some of the high quality stuff out there. The important thing will come later (when I finally get it done). The documentation of which assets appear like they will work well together in a game. That is the bottom line I am after. Because all of this beautiful art is of no use to me if I cannot actually find enough to work together to complete games.

[GarBenjamin]

Side View - Low Res Pixel Art Sets

Set #1 = $123 for everything

Animated Pixel Pack $35
Animated 2D Monster Pack $15
Pixel Art Enemy Pack 2 $10
RPG Pixel Sprites - Mini Folk $10
RPG Pixel Sprites - Mini Monsters $10
RPG Pixel Sprites - Mini Magicks $10
RPG Pixel Sprites - Mini Orcs $10
Parallax Dusk Mountain Background Free
Retro Castle Sprites $1
Castle Zone Tileset $12
2D Platform Tile Set - Cave $10

Here is an example of what a scene might look like when using some of the content from the first 4 or so packs:

And here is what a scene might look like using content from a couple of the first packs and 3 of the 4 packs I just added to the set today (the above image is at 4x and this one is at 3x):

Of course it’s very easy to do a bit of color work to blend things together a little more and get a softer look (or go the opposite of what I did here to get a coarser feel).

A lot of folks might not care much for the increased saturation here but I do like my pixel art to be colorful. Anyway just saying I don’t mind doing a little work to change colors, blend different art sets and such.

My Thoughts:
Overall, I am very impressed with this combination. There are many different characters that would work for player characters and / or NPCs. And many different monsters. Oddly the biggest thing lacking here was the environment graphics but with the addition of the last three assets environment graphics are not so lacking. Also it would be quite easy to find low res pixel art tiles for more variety in the environments. And quite easy to knock them out as well.

I think this combination (you have to imagine them all being animated) produces visuals as effective as many of the popular low res 2D pixel art games made by Indies in recent years. I’ll definitely be grabbing all of these at some point and putting them to good use.

You probably noticed the last four sets were made by the same person. This is a very good thing. They should continue making art sets. Perhaps creating a pack of scenery tiles would be a great choice for the next art project.

If you wanted tighter cohesion you could use only the first 3 sets together and only the last 4 sets together. But IMO they can all be used. You just get different size characters. As can be seen in the mock-up I created above. That’s actually a great thing I think because people and critters and such come in different sizes.

For only $123 to get all of this great content is a bargain. This is a lot of cohesive content!

[GarBenjamin]

Set #2 = $100 for everything

Pixel Hero Volume 1 $20
Pixel Hero Volume 2 $20
Pixel Hero Volume 3 $20
Pixel Hero Volume 4 $20
Pixel Hero Volume 5 $20

In this case, all 5 of these asset packs were created by the same person using the same basic style throughout. So here I am just showing the screenshots of 5 together:

And then my slightly modified version showing how I might adjust the colors to make these a little more cohesive if used in the same game:

My Thoughts:
Overall, I think this is a fine collection of pixel art. We get images to create 5 distinct level environments,5 different player characters (which of course, we could use only one… or offer multiples for the player to choose from or even go with a multiplayer platformer or use some of the player characters as enemy bosses or perhaps a type of NPC the sky is really the limit when it comes to repurposing things for games) and a variety of different enemies.

For only $100 we get all of this great content making this another bargain.

[GarBenjamin]

I also tested some of the very high quality (kind of 3D looking) HD assets but they do not combine in a usable way.

I then tested some HD cartoon style asset packs and they combine much better.

So bottom line is the pixel art combines the best (particularly low res pixel art) and then HD cartoon style art.

The biggest challenge is in finding enough character art in the HD cartoon style. Lots of background imagery.

So you need to check the other online stores. Just Google (or whatever you use)…

buy 2d game art

[neginfinity]

Gar, you might want to check out RPG-maker tilemaps and character libraries. There are a lot of those floating around, they include character generators as well, and at least some of those are compatible with unity.

Also, consider duplicating content of the thread in some sort of blog, because threads get buried.

[GarBenjamin]

Yeah I am thinking the same thing. I made another thread once sharing the art resources I found over the years.

I bookmarked it when I created it because I’d knew it would get buried. I need to update it. Still have many resources to list.

Anyway, that is a great idea. I will duplicate this on one of my websites and then hook it in my signature here when I get it all done.

Also great idea about the other art libraries out there. There are many other sources for quality art actually. Construct store is quite good too.

But I want to focus this thread on just the Unity Asset Store. There are a lot of very talented artists listing their work there. And maybe by doing and if some holes are uncovered they will fill them in. That can only help everyone.

[MV10]

I haven’t paid much attention to it, but I thought it was already categorized? Or are those user-entered tags?

[GarBenjamin]

@MV10

I haven’t paid much attention to it, but I thought it was already categorized? Or are those user-entered tags?

It’s not really categorized in a way that makes sense to me at least. But mainly I need to categorize them by overall “type” (side on view such platformer / infinite runner / beat em up etc that all being one “type”, Top down / Isometric RPG “type”, etc) and then further categorize by art style as ultra low res pixel art, pixel art, HD and Superior HD (=best of the best) so I can finally get to the point of listing them in sets of which different art assets can be used together.

It’s such a huge problem in my experience. This art content seems to be created just randomly with no to very little thought as to how people would actually be able to make a full game using it.

Ideally we’d have like 50+ different fonts and other GUI assets that can be used for any given asset (with some crossover of course). And for each asset at least enough other assets that can work with it to provide everything else needed to make a game. I think the Asset Store is far from that point right now. But I really want to know what we have to work with so that’s why I’m doing this.

I have the impression the majority of the art up there is focused around making ultra simplistic tiny mobile games. I wish there were two major categories for art assets. Mobile. Desktop. And then I think it would be painfully obvious the desktop side is severely lacking.

I’ll be back at it tonight after work.

[MV10]

@GarBenjamin

I have the impression the majority of the art up there is focused around making ultra simplistic tiny mobile games. I wish there were two major categories for art assets. Mobile. Desktop. And then I think it would be painfully obvious the desktop side is severely lacking.

And people would probably just mark everything as both anyway to maximize exposure…

What you describe is how I feel about pre-made assets in general, 2D or 3D. Few “kits” seem sufficiently complete to be useful, and it’s generally impossible to piece together multiple sources that work well together. I even had trouble finding a small handful of placeholder models – spent way more time than I like in Blender cleaning them up. (Seriously, does a rectangular factory building with 24 windows and two doors really warrant 600,000 faces?)

Not that my observation is news to anybody. Just griping.

[GarBenjamin]

@MV10 Absolutely spot on. That’s why I “need” to do this. There is always something up there that I’d use BUT the problem is it doesn’t help any (at least not me) if I need to make the other 50% of the art myself.

Say I find enough to handle 50% of the art for a given game. If I have to do the other 50% then I will simply not buy the assets at all. Reason being it would take far more work to try to edit those assets to match my own art or try to make my art match those assets. And in both cases that would mean the other art would never be the best looking of the assets because I simply cannot spend that kind of time and if I did many would still be beyond my skill.

So in a nutshell using those assets in such a scenario has not saved me any work and time; it actually created more work for me to do. It makes more sense to just do everything myself using low res pixel art so I can focus on the actual gameplay experience.

I believe there is a massive opportunity here. A win-win for the asset store artists and devs. If they’d create the assets for a full game providing everything they can think of that would be helpful would be one way. Another (I think better) approach would be for the artists to just make packs. Do a terrain pack complete with props. Then do a characters pack that fits the first one. Then do an enemies pack that fits the first one. Then an obstacle pack. Etc.

OR (and this is something I’ve suggested to asset creators at least a few times now) is just look out there on the store and make asset packs that complement what is already there. Fill in the holes.

If my passion and skill were for making art that is exactly what I would be doing. Just going through the store finding great packs and making art that can be used with them. Covering terrain, obstacles, weapons, enemies, GUI, etc.

I’ve even thought about hiring artists to do this and selling the complimentary packs myself.

[Billy4184]

You know what I think would be great - if somehow artists on the store could redress eachother’s kits and sell them for a split profit, or something like that. I feel like it would be win win in the sense that a lot of people would otherwise not buy it since it’s not going to fit in with other stuff they’ve bought.

Or maybe an artist could create a pack style, and others could make stuff for it (which would be reviewed by the original creator of the pack) and if it’s accepted there would be a standardized way of calculating the profit they’d get, e.g., everything is categorized into props/characters/vehicles/whatever, each category has a monetary value, and the fraction of the total price of the kit that a new asset contributes is the fraction of each sale that they’d get.

And the original creator might have the discretion to modify the assets as they see fit to make them work better with their vision of the style.

I could imagine some insanely huge packs becoming possible - big enough to make an entire game.

[Martin_H]

@Billy4184

You know what I think would be great - if somehow artists on the store could redress eachother’s kits and sell them for a split profit, or something like that. I feel like it would be win win in the sense that a lot of people would otherwise not buy it since it’s not going to fit in with other stuff they’ve bought.

Or maybe an artist could create a pack style, and others could make stuff for it (which would be reviewed by the original creator of the pack) and if it’s accepted there would be a standardized way of calculating the profit they’d get, e.g., everything is categorized into props/characters/vehicles/whatever, each category has a monetary value, and the fraction of the total price of the kit that a new asset contributes is the fraction of each sale that they’d get.

And the original creator might have the discretion to modify the assets as they see fit to make them work better with their vision of the style.

I could imagine some insanely huge packs becoming possible - big enough to make an entire game.

On every occasion I’ve suggested they implement something to allow people to agree on revenue splits for shared-development-assets the answer was “no”. And sorting that stuff out on your own between different artists/devs is just too much hassle to be worth it.

[Billy4184]

@Martin_H

On every occasion I’ve suggested they implement something to allow people to agree on revenue splits for shared-development-assets the answer was “no”. And sorting that stuff out on your own between different artists/devs is just too much hassle to be worth it.

You mean you got a no from UT?

I could imagine it being possible to create the collaboration part outside of the store - it would take a certain amount of reputation and trust between the artists and it’s a small risk (considering that from UT’s point of view the kit belongs only to one person, and you couldn’t take any complaints to them). But every collaboration is a risk and it may be one worth taking, at least to see how it works out.

To be clear, one person would legally own all the assets and the whole thing would have to operate on a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ but if the owner was someone with a long-term presence and fairly in the ‘public eye’ it might work out well.

Also, the pack could be live almost immediately, with the potential to begin making money straight away, so the collaboration part wouldn’t rely on long periods of time between starting work and getting paid.

[Socrates]

@neginfinity

Gar, you might want to check out RPG-maker tilemaps and character libraries. There are a lot of those floating around, they include character generators as well, and at least some of those are compatible with unity.

Just be careful with the licensing. I’ve seen quite a few that specify you have to use them in the RPG Maker program itself only. That includes packages released by various independent artists not directly associated with RPG Maker.

[GarBenjamin]

I have to say I’ve always enjoyed platform games. Whether single screen platformers or side scrolling games such as Castlevania and Mega Man. But geesh… I am nearly burnt out at this point of seeing art for platformer style games. There is just so much of this kind of art on the Asset Store… it is just kind of mind numbing.

And some really excellent art too! I can only guess the reason I have not seen any games taking advantage of this art to make some cool side scrolling games is due to the question this thread is hoping to answer… not being able to actually gather up enough supporting cohesive art.

There is so much art for such games on the asset store I actually think it might be possible for full games of this kind (of a fairly large scope) to be completed. Soon, I can start working on the sets and find out.

EDIT: Although actually you know… I don’t believe I have come across even one 2D art asset that has a Castlevania style character with whip for weapon. Everyone seems obsessed with guns. The more I look at this stuff the more I can see how much content is lacking up there.

[GarBenjamin]

Finally got off work and some lawn mowing done blah blah. Anyway, had a chance to finish off categorizing the remaining 2D art assets.

That is a significant milestone in this project. Means I am probably about 20% done at this point. Next is to go through everything in the sub categories and group them into sets of different assets that look like they will work together. That will be time consuming. I will likely need to bring screenshots of each asset into a paint program and merge them to do this accurately.

I’ll be starting on that work later tonight. In the meantime, I took the time to go through the new additions to the Superior HD category for Side view / Platformer art.

Of the additional 93 assets I just categorized these are the best of the best for raw art quality IMO… again listed in no particular order. When I say best of the best I mean for the HD style art.

Platformer Tiles Pack 1


Creepy Dungeon Platform Tileset


2D Death Traps Egypt

2D Tiki Toon

Far East 2D

It wasn’t so easy for me to choose the best of the best and some people may not agree with my choices. I could only go by my eye as a gamer. Judging the imagery based on how interesting it is and how excellent it is implemented.

I am so glad to have these 293 assets categorized. I purged a couple more assets too. I started with about 300 hand selected assets originally but when you go through them all like this your expectations seem to increase.

Honestly, at this point I am bit mentally burnt out from it all.

[Martin_H]

@GarBenjamin

but when you go through them all like this your expectations seem to increase.

Honestly, at this point I am bit mentally burnt out from it all.

I think gamers browsing steam during a sale will have a similar experience.

[GarBenjamin]

Since I am still not ready to start on the next phase I am stalling… I mean I figured I might as well show some of the awesome things I found in the other categories.

2D Isometric Elements from the TOP DOWN & ISOMETRIC category

2D Modular Spaceships from the SHMUP category

Race Cars 2D from the RACING category

Fruit Village from the “WEIRD ANGLED VIEW” & MISC category (some things just don’t quite fit in the other categories yet they are still very nice).


HD Background Art Five from the Facing Screen, Single Screen & Backdrops category

I need to get some more work done on my game projects. At some point later I will get started on the next phase.

[GarBenjamin]

Started working on the Side View - Low Res Pixel Art Sets

Will update this post as I make progress and fill them in back up at the top as well.

Side View - Low Res Pixel Art Sets

Set #1 = $123 for everything

Animated Pixel Pack $35
Animated 2D Monster Pack $15
Pixel Art Enemy Pack 2 $10
RPG Pixel Sprites - Mini Folk $10
RPG Pixel Sprites - Mini Monsters $10
RPG Pixel Sprites - Mini Magicks $10
RPG Pixel Sprites - Mini Orcs $10
Parallax Dusk Mountain Background Free
Retro Castle Sprites $1
Castle Zone Tileset $12
2D Platform Tile Set - Cave $10

Here is an example of what a scene might look like when using some of the content from the first 4 or so packs:

And here is what a scene might look like using content from a couple of the first packs and 3 of the 4 packs I just added to the set today (the above image is at 4x and this one is at 3x):

Of course it’s very easy to do a bit of color work to blend things together a little more and get a softer look (or go the opposite of what I did here to get a coarser feel).

A lot of folks might not care much for the increased saturation here but I do like my pixel art to be colorful. Anyway just saying I don’t mind doing a little work to change colors, blend different art sets and such.

My Thoughts:
Overall, I am very impressed with this combination. There are many different characters that would work for player characters and / or NPCs. And many different monsters. Oddly the biggest thing lacking here was the environment graphics but with the addition of the last three assets environment graphics are not so lacking. Also it would be quite easy to find low res pixel art tiles for more variety in the environments. And quite easy to knock them out as well.

I think this combination (you have to imagine them all being animated) produces visuals as effective as many of the popular low res 2D pixel art games made by Indies in recent years. I’ll definitely be grabbing all of these at some point and putting them to good use.

You probably noticed the last four sets were made by the same person. This is a very good thing. They should continue making art sets. Perhaps creating a pack of scenery tiles would be a great choice for the next art project.

If you wanted tighter cohesion you could use only the first 3 sets together and only the last 4 sets together. But IMO they can all be used. You just get different size characters. As can be seen in the mock-up I created above. That’s actually a great thing I think because people and critters and such come in different sizes.

For only $123 to get all of this great content is a bargain. This is a lot of cohesive content!

Set #2 = $100 for everything

Pixel Hero Volume 1 $20
Pixel Hero Volume 2 $20
Pixel Hero Volume 3 $20
Pixel Hero Volume 4 $20
Pixel Hero Volume 5 $20

In this case, all 5 of these asset packs were created by the same person using the same basic style throughout. So here I am just showing the screenshots of 5 together:

And then my slightly modified version showing how I might adjust the colors to make these a little more cohesive if used in the same game:

My Thoughts:
Overall, I think this is a fine collection of pixel art. We get images to create 5 distinct level environments,5 different player characters (which of course, we could use only one… or offer multiples for the player to choose from or even go with a multiplayer platformer or use some of the player characters as enemy bosses or perhaps a type of NPC the sky is really the limit when it comes to repurposing things for games) and a variety of different enemies.

For only $100 we get all of this great content making this another bargain.

[MV10]

I will never understand the attraction of low-res.