Solving a BIG problem (GRAPHICS) ... if it is actually a common problem

News & General Discussion
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Hey folks… I have a question for you and I’d like to throw out an idea I have and see what you think.

I don’t know how big of a problem this really is. It could well be that I am in the minority but let me just throw it out here.

For me, the greatest problem I face in game dev are the graphics. And I am talking about 2D art assets here. Primarily pixel art but the same applies to HD 2D art.

Creating the art that I need to make the kind of games I want to make (and doing it in a timely manner!) has always been the greatest roadblock between a game in my head as an idea and a game completed ready for people to play.

I’ve tried various things to combat this including hiring artists, trying to find existing art assets I can buy and creating all of the art myself.

All of these cases have the problem of speed. Often I have looked for art assets wasted so much time I just drew them myself. So trying to buy existing art assets saved me no time only added wasted time.

I’ve hired artists and this can be an efficient route to take once things get going. Although it can be slow up front with communication and so forth.

And just doing it all myself is just so freaking boring & again time consuming

So… first question is…

Do any of you have this problem… You would be completing games regularly if you just had all of the dang art assets you need but you don’t and getting those art assets is a huge obstacle?

I’ve thought many times now about hiring several artists to create graphic sets… sets that will cover a variety of games with an art style and palette that will allow every piece to work together. So one could have a platformer that ends up in a shmup that ends up in a roguelike, etc.

The problem is no art asset will be exactly what a person has in their mind. And people don’t like the idea of making a game with art that looks like a dozen other games out there. I personally don’t have a big problem with this because I can always edit and customize the art and add new stuff, etc.

Anyway, so I gave this some more thought tonight and I created a humanoid pixel art character to illustrate what I am thinking.

That’s the normal size and then scaled up x2.

So, I have put a tremendous amount of thought into this problem over the years. And what I’m thinking is how useful would it be to have art assets where everything is simple solid shaded imagery like the above? The idea being every person who bought such a pack could then recolor and add details to customize as they see fit. But all of the base images for poses and animation sequences would be provided.

So the bulk of the work has been done. And now it is kind of like a paint-by-numbers set. And I imagine some people would just use the art “as is” which is fine too.

See, I think this would make it so the artists could generate the art quite quickly and cheaply. And for us devs who had these packs we would have these “templates” that we could customize as we see fit for each game. Meaning we could actually take any one of these “blanks” and recolor and customize it uniquely to be used in several different games we make.

What do you think about such an approach… would something like this be helpful in generating the 2D art you need to bring your games to life?

For me personally, having a bunch of complete art assets done in this solid shaded style would be of tremendous value. Heck, I could prototype my games using the art “as is”. And then spend time coloring and adding details at the end.

Well thanks for taking the time to read this and I appreciate your input.

Like I said, I don’t know if maybe most everyone else just enjoys spending hours, days, weeks and months creating all the graphics from scratch. I don’t. If I wasn’t actually trying to make games I would enjoy it. But when trying to make a game it just becomes a huge obstacle taking so much time it removes much of the enjoyment of game dev for me.

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I guess you’re thinking sort of along the lines of re-purposing the art, being able to ‘get the most out of it’ by making it easy to modify, making it modular etc. This modularity is a direction many people go in to try to save time. You could e.g. have custom things to hold, and mustaches :wink:

Without you creating quite a large set of ‘parts’ I’m not sure how much this would appeal.

But I do agree that in general the art content is really a difficult part of development. It’s not something that can very easily be overcome with automation, or with scripting, or fancy programs that procedurally generate etc. It’s one of those hard, doesn’t-scale-well things that almost needs a single person to spend lots of doing working on a single image and then not being able to use it for anything else, kind of deals. I’ve often thought Unity would be great with some kind of super-advanced content generation system that is highly configurable/adjustable and/or can bang out variations on a theme without much tweaking needed. But this would be extremely high level and sophisticated. There are some mesh generators on the asset store that generate for example specific things like a ‘plant’ or a basic spaceship or something, but you can see why they are limited to specifics because it’s hard to map a whole world full of possibilities into a single piece of software. Unfortunately we don’t have star-trek food replicators yet.

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Even with the option to re-color the images, it would still be limited to one art style and what ever animations/poses were included. Really good pixel art games set themselves apart with unique art styles. If we listed several of the top pixel art games from last year, each of them is unique visually.

One idea I have kicked around is finding or building some software that could convert pictures into pixel art, and have various sliders to try to mix different aspects of various art styles.

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Well I wasn’t even thinking of mustaches, beards and such… I was coming from the angle that each developer could add whatever details they wanted. But all of the base imagery would be there, kind of like “blanks”. If they wanted to give them mustaches, hair, whatever they can do it. All of the animation sequences would be there for walk, run, jump, leap, duck, knock back, using a swinging attack, using a gun, fist fighting, etc.

The developers would add the actual weapons. I mean I guess I could easily have the artists knock out a set of weapons to be used for each of the character as well. Yeah, that might be useful would save all of us time.

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That is true so what I am thinking of for that is to have many (MANY) of these sets. Like a massive number of them. Say this character with all of his animation frames for everything is done and costs maybe oh I don’t know like $5 or so. Then another character maybe a female same way. And various enemies same way (basically with each enemy being treated as a player character with all of the animations available).

Of course some characters would be short and stocky, some would be super skinny, etc.

One thing I hate about buying canned art sets is whoever made them seems to have never made a game before.

I want to see animations for idle, walking, crawling, ducking, jumping, leaping, being injured in 2 or 3 ways (ideally a high, middle and low injury animation), climbing, swimming, picking something up, using a lever, combat in several different styles (punching, swinging, using a pistol, using a rifle, etc).

When I say a complete set I literally mean a complete set. At least as far as what I expect from graphics assets I check out and am always disappointed by.

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This reminds me of back when I had an Amiga and I had a friend take dozens of photos of myself, digitized them then drew over them to make a hero character for a Castlevania style game. See that would be cool too. If someone would just put up a huge number of sets of digitized characters. Some people would use them as is I am sure but I would just draw over them. The important thing is to have all of the poses and animation sequences done. That is the tedious time consuming part for 2D IMO.

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Just to clarify, I am not saying make this a Unity Asset with sliders that can change pants color, shirt color, etc. I mean providing all of the core of the artwork already done. All of the animations for a character done. And then the developer can take the images into the paint program of their choice and customize the images as they see fit. The benefit is they wouldn’t need to worry about actually drawing all of the frames of animation and the solid shading would define each major part.

So, it is not meant to be a game ready pack. It would be built entirely to provide a massive jump start. Because all a person would need to do is color and add details to these characters, enemies, etc. Like someone may use two shades of green and give the dude camo pants. Someone else, may use skin tones and remove the characters shirt completely. But everything would be there ready to work with. They just fill in the blanks so to speak.

Or they give it to their artist (or hire an artist) to fill in the details. Since the actual character base designs and all images for their animations are already done the artist only needs to texture them.

Same for lighting. Because they are provided as solid shaded people can then add lighting from any angle they like when they do their texturing.

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Are there not already rotoscoped outline sets available? I thought that kind of thing would be a common animation resource, if nothing else.

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What is the full list for a complete set, though? For example, Stardew Valley has a lot of animations that you did not list, such as watering plants, planting seeds, jumping for joy, breaking a rock with a pick axe, etc. Every game could have a detailed and unique list of animations.

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That would be worth looking for.

I was actually just thinking… I’ve always thought gameplay was the most important thing but I’d still spend some minutes on drawing each image for a game. Problem is a game needs many images hundreds at the least and generally thousands when animation is taken into account.

So… I think I have come to a decision. I am just going to knock out the graphics super fast. Like literally 30 seconds on a tree. 30 seconds on each frame of an animated character, etc.

Then I will make the game. I should have thought of this sooner. The answer was right there all of the time. I was spending minutes per image and that was still way too long. I just need to get the time down to less than a minute per image. Ideally like 10 to 15 seconds per image. Then I can generate the content quickly enough. :slight_smile:

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Yeah you are right and see that is the issue with every asset pack that exists anywhere. There is only ever enough content to create a very limited game. I was just thinking of assets for the bulk of action, metroidvania, adventure, combat style games.

I think there is no real solution unless several dozen people decide to do the kind of thing I was describing OR they just create packs. Hundreds or thousands of packs.

Like I said in my post above I am just going to go a different route now. But I thought it was worth throwing the idea out for consideration.

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Well paradoxically, to generate lots of adaptable 2d contents … you need 3d :smile:

2D is tied to art styles, every animation need to be generated for every direction you need, you need to apply effect manually like the cutting edge technique of shadow! and many more.

All of that come for free in 3d, animation is reusable to character with vastly different morphology, the mesh can be adapted to fit different style and rendering, you can dynamically change the appearance depending on resolution, you can modify how stuff generate relative to each others (like having eyes always on top of hair), you can mix and match part with great modularity, you have infinite resolution on animation, animation can be combine together, you change color at will …

and all you need is to render the result to whatever 2d you need(top down, side scrolling, isometric, you name it)!, some people even made rendering directly into good pixel art …

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Test complete.< 5 minutes for a character, base scene and then a tree prop.

I can work with this. Graphics problem is solved. I still need to get faster. I need to knock this much out in about 3 minutes or less. I think that is reasonable.

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I was actually thinking that. I could use poser to create humanoid characters. Get 3D models for enemies and so forth and render them out. There is an asset on the store that I bought tonight to do that. But looked like it would take some time to figure it out.

I’m just going to knock out the graphics as fast as I can while still making the objects readable.

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Firstly I definitely have this problem. I have a huge library of art I have commissioned, and art I have found from the numerous game art sites around the web. But yet I still have this problem. So I agree it exists, and expect its very common.

I think the biggest issue is that the customisation just doesn’t work out that easy. As far as programmer art goes I’m not that bad, I’ve even managed to sell a few UI kits that I did myself. Yesterday I tried to add a gun to an animated character sheet I had. Its a fairly complex sheet about 90 frames, but low res. It took me around 2 hours to do just the idle and walk (about 10 frames), and the results were pretty average. In fact I threw them away, there’s no way I was going to spend 180 (2 hours * 9 * 10 variations) for such average looking results.

So even if you had enough animations to be useful for prototyping, and even if you had enough tiles and enemies to flesh out a reasonable game without constantly running in to things you want to do but cant due to lack of graphics, for non-artists the customisation would still either take hundreds of hours, or look bad, or both.

From another angle http://kenney.nl/ has 35,000 free sprites. About 12k to do with platforming. The coverage is barely enough to do any but the simplest game.

I think this is a better approach, and if you add a well organised easy to use library with hundreds of variations and animations I think this would do a better job of solving the problem. But given you probably need something like 50,000 frames I’m just not sure its commercially viable.

Maybe if you had a good start you could go for something like Kickstarter or Patreon.

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PS 3D approach is a good one, but it does tend to limit you to a certain style.

PPS I think you have a lower threshold of acceptable than most :slight_smile:

PPPS I just remember I tried to do something vaguely similar to this (albeit with much more styled characters):

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Thanks for that! I am glad I am not the only one. I see it the same way. I have looked at thousands of 2d art assets free and paid all over the Internet and even with all of those only the most basic game can be made. Exactly as you said. It is just strange to me. Either every artist making 2D packs must be thinking of ultra simplistic mobile games or is not really thinking in the true context of a game when they make these packs.

It amazes me that even an average NES game from 25 to 30 years ago cannot be remade with the existing art assets. There would be enough to replicate about 2/3 of this level and 3/4 of that level at best. It is pretty crazy. lol

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So… would going 3D perhaps be an option? Have animated skinned meshes where you can parent accessories and re-texture components as desired, and either render them or use them to generate sprite sets. I’m sure the amortised frame time would drop significantly, then, at the cost of not having the same level of artistic freedom as you get from hand-colouring every pixel (which you don’t have if you’re using pre-defined shapes anyway).

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That’s pretty cool work! Looks like you were heading in a good direction with it.

Ha ha about the lower threshold of acceptable… well I am at the point where I just truly don’t care anymore. Well I care enough to not just scribble and call it a tree or make stick figures… hmm… stick figures… could be a nice aesthetic… super easy to knock out. I may have to explore that in the future.

I think I will just press on animating the character. And proceed from there. At some point I will revisit the palette and do some better colors. But for now just going to grind out art as fast as I can. I really think it is the key to making the bigger more interactive games I want to create. When animated and then recolored with color theory in mind I think it all may just look good enough to play. I probably won’t have the black outlines either. Not sure yet.

I won’t know unless I try. So I am going to knock out enough graphics and animations for a decent level and then see how it turns out.

See it is true I’d prefer to play a game with a tree looking like the one I drew above if it was interactive in some way much more than I would to play a game with a beautiful looking tree that serves no purpose other than eye candy. I am probably in the minority on that.

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… Or you could spend a few more minutes just to ensure any potential players don’t immediately gouge their eyes out. Just think that you have to prove that your game isn’t made by an eight year old in the first two seconds.

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