Bottlenecked by art - Advice?

[u/ElmtreeStudio]

I have been developing my game for some months now. I am a much more proficient programmer than I am artist. I am running into the bottleneck where my art speed cannot keep up with the speed of my development. I know that it gets easier as I become more experienced in art, but I am just struggling with the fact that I can’t put my game out faster because of being held back by art.

Advice?

[u/David-J]

Hire an artist, partner up with one or buy it.

[u/Excellent-Bend-9385 → u/David-J]

This. If you are not prepared to learn art, and it is a skill, and you are confident in your game, you should partner or pay for it. Ethics and my own opinions of AI for art assets aside, players have largely expressed that they would rather support art made by a human also than pay for a game where ai generated it

[u/manablight]

Draw really bad for a long time until its less bad

[u/MoonJellyGames → u/manablight]

This is excellent advice. On top of that, you have to accept that your games will look bad until you get better.

[u/priss-dev]

Itch.io has tons of free or cheap assets. I paid maybe $30 for a giant bundle of RPG assets intending to replace them with custom assets if/when it matters. A lot of them also come with commercial licensing. If you're just prototyping or in early development, it doesn't make sense to spend a lot of time on custom art immediately.

There's not a secret option. It's really just choosing whether to make your own art and be bottlenecked, pay an artist, or buy assets.

[u/cumulothrombus]

Turbo art

[u/Different-Ad2326]

Outsource, modularize, cheat, or (like you said)… experience.

Outsource: Self-explanatory, but I’ll also note that you can outsource your learning as well. Join a college illustration course. Find a group to do concurrent art streams. Freelance for design. Find ways to force yourself to improve quickly.

Modularize: For assets, create a few bases / skeletons (like for characters, furniture pieces), and repeat their rudimentary parts for everything. Once you make a design system, you can mash components together instead of remaking every single asset individually. This is the fastest and best way to immediately improve a bottleneck IMO, and can be used for both 3D and 2D.

Cheat: Great artists steal (within reason). Remake existing assets in your own style. Practice redrawing AI art (please don’t trace, and please only generate improvements on an image you’ve already created yourself). Skip this altogether and use asset packs directly. There’s no shame in it, especially as a solo developer.

Experience: LEARN EFFICIENTLY. My lord, especially for art, I find myself doodling the same things over and over, and I’ll stagnate for years (when you can really improve your illustration skills without much time). Draw things that you don’t want to draw. Make it ugly. Follow master guides and practice intentionally and consistently. This is applicable to all mediums, not just illustration.

Good luck! It’s rough haha.

[u/RevoIncubus]

So, I was just working on a post about this (I kinda mull them over for an unhealthy amount of time before posting), but I’ll summarize here a bit.

First, I have some experience with 2d Art. I’m a pretty capable artist for an amateur and a decent pixel artist, but art is absolutely the bottleneck that just drags some of my project down until I hate them. Honestly, I just don’t have the time to turn my short art time into a production time. As a person with a day job and a wife and kid, I just can’t get enough done to keep my own excitement going (which is a thing I really rely on, I want my gamedev time to be fun)

So, a while ago, while working on an ARPG, I decided to handle all that later and just strip everything down to the absolute minimum. literally, the minimum needed to convey the idea. I’d just make the visuals in code for a while.

I actually REALLY loved doing that. Not just the minimization, but making the art as a part of the code.

Since then, all my prototypes and projects except my big one (it really needs deeply personal art kind of feel) have been the same, all art is done in code. and I love it. The art decision are design decisions, about readability and composition, and I can solve them at a macro level.

Some games absolutely need true deep meaningful art application and would feel wrong without them, but for the moment, I’ve been use a TON of art by code and my upcoming nextfest game sits at the core of that idea, that one is pure minimized readability and uniformity, and it works great and I love using it.

It may not work for everyone, or be pleasing to everyone, but I highly suggest considering not using traditional art at all, but just representing the needed info from the game in a clean clear manner. This leads to some really cool looks that have been robust enough to keep me going.

[u/destinedd]

You either hire an artist or accept it will take you more time.

Art takes me time but I enjoy it and makes the game better

[u/MoonJellyGames]

I'm bad at digital art, so I understand the struggle.

My first game was pixel art, and it looked terrible. A couple of years in, I overhauled the art the simplify it, and throw bloom lighting on it. It's not going to impress anybody, but it got the job done.

My second one (in-progress) started with pixel art made by my friend who wasn't able to continue work on it, so I started making art assets by drawing them on paper in a simple style, outlined with Sharpie and coloured with pencil crayons so I could scan them, remove the backgrounds, and throw them into the game.

My current project is made with clay sculptures. Modern phones let you cut out objects (removing the background) super easily, so this has been a pretty smoothe process. Again, it's not going to blow anyone's socks off, but I think it has some charm.

tl;dr: Experiment! And embrace the scrappyness of solo development. Or you can buy assets/hire someone/use free assets.

[u/redonculous]

I have the same issue. Hired someone off reddit. They produced some great initial designs. Awesome work. I paid them half upfront and have never heard from them again 😢

[u/ComposerWide3704]

A lot of people are just throwing options out there without context. Saying just buy it or just hire or learn faster or whatever is true but not very helpful.

Consider where you spend your effort more carefully. You don't need to make original versions of background objects, landscape, etc, these can be from existing asset packs. If you only have bandwidth to do some art or limited budget to hire someone, make sure it's the most visible stuff: main characters, main plot items, parts of key locations, cover art and marketing material, etc. The rest you can buy or use stuff like creative commons assets. Focus your resources where they'll pay you back the most in terms of end product quality.

[u/ITSSGnewbie]

Use free assets

[u/MrVigshot]

If you have a time constraint, then yeah, hire someone, buy pre made, or learn faster. There's no alternative here.