How does a one man team with very little art experience get art assets for their game?

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1

Hello everyone,
After two months of learning (without any prior coding knowledge) i’ve gotten pretty much all of the core game mechanics of “sanctum 2” ,which i am trying to mimic for my first game, implemented without any bugs left. The assets i used are only placeholders for now and finding fitting assets seems to be the biggest roadblock for me. After like 18hrs of tinkering in blender i expanded a base humanoid mesh and tried to rig it to get animations going… but oh god habe those been ugly… knees bending outwards all the time flapping like wings and so on. I really enjoy coding and while i also do enjoy modelling learning it to a level i would be happy with is just too time consuming while i also learn/improve with coding.

So how do you guys get your art assets if you are not doing them by yourself? Yeah yeah i could go to the asset store but there are simply NO models that include all the animations i need. Can one simply create additional animations on top of existing models? How does that work?
I wouldn’t like my game a lot if player and enemies just slide along the ground in t-pose…
I know paying freelancers to make them for you is a way but i am not really willing to pay for art for my first games which most likely will generate 0 money

2

Yes, you can create additional animations. Also, for humanoid animations, you can use animations from other (also humanoid) models. You can find huge libraries of humanoid animations at places like https://www.mixamo.com/.

Alternatively, of course, you could choose a different game design that doesn’t need animated 3D characters, to fit better with your skills and budget. Plenty of great games over the years (including some modern hits) fit this mould.

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