Unity, Kismet's Unity, GameMaker, RPGMaker, Flash... more than ever before it's easy for an artist with an idea to just pick one of those tools and connect a few visual logic nodes (Kismet), use tons of community-made or built-in functionality (Unity, RPGMaker) or even take a stab in some basic scripting to get a neat little game going, with awesome art they can provide themselves. I'm not talking about BF4 or the next Modern Warfare here, but an artist one-man-team can definitely get far and make something of quality today.

But what of the other side of the coin? What if you're a non-artistic programmer instead? Sure there are some "free" resources out there but frankly, from my research, the selection isn't the greatest and many indie games are already criticized for using "stock" assets (particularily with RPGMaker or Unity). Sure you can go for the simplistic/blocky design with programmer-art, but that significantly limits your options - much more than how an artist is limited by community made/built in "scripts" with the tools I outline above.


(Note I'm talking about "free" projects - I know there are many paid model/sprite repositories and artists who work by commission, but again tools like Unity and even UDK are completely free for small noncommercial projects)


I just thought it'd be an interesting topic for GameDev. Am I the only programmer who sometimes feels he would actually have greater flexibility by trading his coding skills for drawing/modelling/composing and going with an exisitng Engine?

I think the surge of popularity in 8-bit style graphics kind of suggests that the graphics themselves aren't exceptionally important, only that they're well done. I'm seeing more and more "Minecraft" style art and animation popping up in place of more 'traditional' graphical tends, and many people seem to have just as much fun with that style of game art.

If you lack the basics of a needed skill set, then go and learn the basics of those needed skill sets. As easy as many engines are to use these days, they still generally require you to have some basic programming and scripting knowledge. If artists can figure those out, then surely programmers can figure out how to draw some basic geometric shapes?

Procedural content - use your programming skills to procedurally generate the art resources you need.

What he said. The better programmer you are, the better your proc-gen content will be.

I think the surge of popularity in 8-bit style graphics kind of suggests that the graphics themselves aren't exceptionally important, only that they're well done. I'm seeing more and more "Minecraft" style art and animation popping up in place of more 'traditional' graphical tends, and many people seem to have just as much fun with that style of game art.

If you lack the basics of a needed skill set, then go and learn the basics of those needed skill sets. As easy as many engines are to use these days, they still generally require you to have some basic programming and scripting knowledge. If artists can figure those out, then surely programmers can figure out how to draw some basic geometric shapes?

yeah, people just have to "lower their standards a little" regarding what they expect from their art assets.

like, a person can actually get pretty far (graphics-wise) but just drawing some stuff in GIMP or Paint.NET and getting used to how to use some of the various effects.

3D modeling is a little harder, mostly because:
the actually "good" commercial tools tend to cost lots of money (and their free analogues tend to be artificially crippled and put limits on what they can be used for in the EULA);
most of the freely available tools tend to range between not-terribly-useful (*1) and generally broken.

*1: such as only supporting full-scene modeling and animation, rather than the sorts of individual models and animations more useful in making games, ...

dunno about now, but last I checked the free 3D modeling apps situation was still lame, and in my case ended up mostly writing my own tools for my uses, but they turned out to not really be "good" either.

alternatively, a person can write up code to draw things, but this isn't necessarily any less effort than using a 3D modeler, sadly...


I had before floated ideas for basically "3D sprites", where essentially depth information would be drawn and used to make a basic 3D object out of a sprite (via a height-map or similar), but haven't really done much with this.

With regard to proc gen, i think roguelikes are an excellent example of this.

I generally more agree for things like worlds / terrain / dungeons / ... than things like general-purpose art assets.

something like a digital camera + GIMP or Paint.NET may go a lot further here.

For non-artist programmers, creating a game was always easy. It's just that those games might not fit your expectations of a marketable game.

For non-artist programmers, creating a game was always easy. It's just that those games might not fit your expectations of a marketable game.

Very true.