You know what’s great about Unity? The asset store.
You know what’s not so great about Unity? Art assets in the asset store.
It’s not that the assets in there are bad, it’s just that it’s so chock full of half measures and it’s really hard to get everything you need for a project.
My solution: hire a small staff of artists to constantly churn out new content that’s available on level 11. With a dedicated staff the assets could be more complete and let devs have a nice consistant library to pick through for their projects.
Maybe make a handful of art styles to use (realism, cartoon, etc…) and then fill out a library of those assets for things that a game would need (chests, swords, guns) all in that particular art style.
Plus, having weekly to monthly additions is instant press. I know I’d clammer to the thread constantly to see what’s new.
Then maybe you could also have the artist take suggestions for new art, OR have them hire out for a flat fee, so that people can get what they need that’s specific to the game and still have it consistent with the art style.
The issue of inconsistent art shouldn’t be considered exclusively for level 11. Currently, art assets aren’t organized very well. There should be sections of the store where all art in them could come from the same world (i.e. low-poly fantasy, toony sci-fi, blocky).
As for hiring full-time artists, well, that shouldn’t be exclusive to level 11 either since that would really limit the audience providers can sell to. Also, it doesn’t really fit the Asset Store but it could work as something like Uber.
I don’t think that it would be good to hire an art staff for the Asset Store. Unity does have their own releases of demo items wich are consistent among themselves. Everything considered I think Unity should focus manpower more on complete demos or features instead of art packages.
I could imagine another solution, though:
What I would rather propose is that the Asset Store might get a dedicated area with selected art styles. These art styles all come with an art guide like Valve has for DOTA models. There might be restrictions to the content submitted in terms of color palettes or shaders used or unified size or grids etc.
Submitting content to these dedicated areas is checked not only for technical aspects but also stylistic. Failure or too much deviation results in the asset being pushed to the open storefront (or a request for certain changes).
DOTA2 as well as big productions show that artists can adapt to styles. That’s not the problem. Right now people creating for the asset store mostly don’t want to adapt to a certain style, though because there is no defined style to cater to. Haveing a Unity artist staff being bombarded with requests for new art would be wasted money, IMO. There are enough people out there who can do that and are wiling to do it as well while at the same time maybe earn a bit of money on the side.
Limiting that to Level11 people would not be a good idea, though. That’s false elitism. Price reduction per set on a monthly basis … maybe. But not a general limitation. Unity is about democratization not artificial barriers.
I’ve wondered for a while now why an enterprising team of artists doesn’t do exactly this on their own. My guess is that it’s because everyone who’s good enough to turn out high volumes of consistent and decent quality assets are already employed doing so for someone else, so the investment required to get a team to cover all bases (environment, props, characters, effects) for a specific style/genre/setting would be significant.
Technically you can make anything in Paint. Each pixel is a few bytes, and if we ignore the pesky header you can save out to BMP and thus use colour values as raw bytes…
This sounds like an awesome idea for an art installation. Make a game. Serialise the whole thing as bitmaps. Then reuse those bitmaps as textures inside the game.
There was a recent art exhibition in my home town something like this. The photographers digital folio became corrupted. Rather then give up they enhanced the resulting images and exhibited anyway. The results were kind of cool.
Pretty much this. Creating consistent art on a large scale can become quite the commitment.
A few of the higher ranking people who earn money with the asset store are rather consistent already. So a few are doing it at least to some degree.
I guess there are other factors as well but I still sort of like my idea of a sort-of community based style selection with art and tech guides to stick to. That way there can potentially be much more assets than just by one team alone - which is a good thing if you want more selection to not make your own game look like everybody else’s. Also it might give a few artists a little more guidance to work towards a certain goal. Creating things for a guessed market can backfire and for single artists it’s not so easy to get a grip on what the market wants.
Also working towards a larger style project increases chances to be seen and frequented on the AssetStore as people know that there will be more assets in the same style and tech range.
