What are your thoughts on indies using premade assets? Do you use them in your own work?
I’m sure this has been discussed to death in all kinds of game dev spaces, just interested in the opinions particular to this forum.
I don’t have an issue with it. I use premade art assets occasionally, but not that often, mostly for incidental things like icons* rather than for main characters or enemy sprites. I prefer to draw these more central elements myself because it feels too impersonal to use something premade. I don’t really judge for using them, though.
I do use premade fonts (both text and sound) and color palettes, though I might modify them.
There is one exception that does grate on me, though, which is the RPG Maker default assets (including the font, which is really bad), or other assets that are designed to blend in with them. I don’t have a problem with RPG Maker itself, but I would encourage developers who work with it to consider using different art, even their own MS Paint doodles; the game will have much more character for it. The RPG Maker graphics do not actually resemble anything from the stratum of games that the engine is meant to evoke. They are detailed, yet tasteless, and unsettling in a way that’s hard to describe. If they remind me of anything, it’s Yoda Stories.
* Though admittedly the game-icons.net images are getting to be kind of distractingly recognizable by now.
rpgmaker chipsets are particularly notorious for the “i’ll replace these later” syndrome where a developer eventually gives up or decides too many maps have already been made and it would be impossible to restructure the game later on.
one good use case i am thinking of were a number of screenshots i used to see the crypt worlds developer share on twitter that would use really distorted and jpegged variants of the rpgmaker RTP assets. not sure how many of those were parts of real projects but it always evoked something for me Horsey I by Lilith Zone
yeah!! this is really just true for any game format. just show me something, anything, visually that tells me something about who actually made what im playing
Yeah, making your own assets is always by definition going to make the game more distinctive, though I understand why people don’t want to grind it all out or just struggle a lot with certain types of assets. The flame icon in my own logo actually comes from game-icons (it’s CC-BY), just because I specifically needed something in vector format and I can’t deal with clearing that hurdle just for that right now. Maybe I should have.
One thing that we tend to forget is that AAA does this ALL the time. We have probably seen the same grass, rock, and brick textures over and over without noticing, and if I hear those same stupid stock page-turning or electrical short sound effects one more time, I am going to Wilhelm scream.
i want to step in and add to the discussion by mentioning how premade assets can be creatively interesting, and maybe show y’all some new ways to think about game assets, almost as typographical tools:
- f3hcs — Geometry Dash level that only uses the very limited object selection from the 1.0 version of the game
- Brogue — beautiful classical roguelike, text-only display
- Winter, 2001: Someone tell Luigi I love him — plundercore game, uses repurposed game assets to great effect
- EON N++ — visually impressive N++ map pack
- MRMOTEXT — incredible tileset, both for prototyping and production, that i can personally vouch for as i used it for multiple projects
- Love — precision platformer that uses pixels as assets and matches behavior to color and shape
(to answer to the title, i use premade and/or handmade assets depending on the project, and often recycle and remix assets from older works of mine)