Graphics and assets plays a great role in making a game, I don’t believe that AAA graphics can make a crappy game good, but a good game can certainly decrease in value and appeal due to poor graphics.
Unfortunately I have the drawing/designing skills of a 6 years old, not my strongest suit, but I am working on it.
Usually at this early stage of development graphics and asset should not really concern me, but giving my previous statement I decided to start looking for some free asset and new tools in advance.
Most of my previous projects were made using free asset but with a lot of manipulation and adjustment.
On my first android game Jasper Jump, I was working with a close friend, Shuky Kappon, who is a little more in touch with his graphical artistic side than me, so we came up with the design for Jasper and I used a cool program called Spriter to create the animations, we made most of the asset for this project ourselves but I also used some free assets to save time, since it wasn’t easy and it took a lot of time.
On the following games i worked alone and used only free asset with modification where needed.
Jumpy Slimy Thingy and Frog Bank are very simple games with simple mechanics and terrible graphics 😉
But it was another stepping stone in my journey and I’m glad I made them.
Jump Slimy Thingy on Google Play
Frog Bank of Google Play
Than came MathNESS, although I used free assets this time too, I put more effort into it and it all fit together very nicely, the game itself is also more complex and the idea in my opinion is great, this game has by far got the most downloads and pay per view ads revenue than all my other games, I believe I will come back to it later on and make it even better, it has some great potential.
On my latest game, Squidish, I decided to push myself a little further and I designed and animated the squid character myself, It’s not a complicated character, but for me it was a challenge nonetheless and I am very happy with the result, for the blowfish design i had help from another designer.
So coming back to Bad Pad, I do intend to make some of the assets and animations myself for this game, I already have a concept and theme in mind and even made some small assets already, but it will be impossible for me to do it all by myself so as I said at the beginning of this post, I am in search for assets.
In my search I found this cool link for indie game developers, it has links to a bunch of free assets libraries and an endless list tools, if you’re an indie developer or you’re thinking of becoming one you should really check it out!
Kudos to David Arcila for this amazing page!
Game Development Resources by David Arcila
Here is a little piece of graphics I already made for the game, an 8 spears wheel.
