Written by I wish I had a proper studio so I can afford a couple of full-time artists, one for 2D and another for 3D assets. I had the good fortune of working with a 2D Vector artist from Serbia (remote work) on a game called DustBunny and it was so inspiring seeing my ideas come to life. Now when I need assets (and inspiration) for a new game, I visit the Unity Asset store.
Sometimes being confined by money or circumstances can be a benefit if you use your creativity to work around those obstacles. My limited knowledge of Unity and C# when I started developing Animal Rampage made me build a very simple sandbox game that many younger kids loved to play (300,000 of them).
In the case of game art, you can use the asset store to find inspiration or ideas for new games by browsing through the catalog.
I used the Unity Asset store for this project to find 3D environments for my new Unity App, 3D Meditation where the user will have an infinite set of sounds combinations as the camera transverses through the environments. I find my assets by first having a general idea of the art style and feeling I want to convey. For 3D Meditation I wanted something calm, not too complex, not too realistic. Also, I wanted an environment that can have the sound of soothing water, wind and birds. You can get some good deals when purchasing packs, so I started searching on “Environment Packs”. Within a few minutes I found this amazing island asset that made me want to be there:
It also has a demo scene with a short camera fly-by to get me going on my animations.
After importing the asset, the next step is to test out the scene for your target device to make sure it will render fast enough. I usually start with my iPhone and do a quick build using the demo scene. In this case the rendering was smooth so I could continue with my development. The cool thing is that even though I am not directly working with the artist of this asset, I am being influenced by the artist and making decisions based on my interactions with the art. For instance, the built-in scene had a camera fly-by that made me decide to use that instead of user-controlled avatars as the default interaction.
In the next blog / video I will go over my process for finding sound assets.
Stay tuned…
Last modified: August 26, 2020