Art on a Tiny Budget Part 2: Strategic Theming
Since writing that, I learned that Steam doesn’t allow AI-generated assets in games published on their platform. I haven’t made any platform decisions yet, but locking myself out of the most popular PC platform seems like a bad start, so my new plan is to not use any AI-generated assets.
So let’s talk about the second solution I worked through to solve my art budget problem: strategic theming!
Genre Constraints
My advice to non-artist indie devs is to start by choosing a genre with gameplay that can be achieved with low-cost art.
Unfortunately I’m mostly ignoring own advice, as I’m trying to recreate the gameplay from my StarCraft II Arcade game, KeyStone, a card game with autobattler-style combat.
This locks me into a couple of particularly difficult art needs:
I need art for every card.
I need animated art for a variety of units/characters.
For years these needs kept from even attempting a non-StarCraft KeyStone successor.
Strategic theming: Spaceship Warfare
I don’t remember how or why the idea of spaceship warfare popped into my head, but once it did it changed everything.
Animated characters are expensive. For 2D, an artist needs to draw each character tens or even hundreds of times. I know less about 3D game art, but some quick research suggests that it’s usually even more expensive.
Example sprite sheet of the “basic” StarCraft I Marine, which it turns out has a lot of animation frames.
But 2D spaceships, drawn in a top down view? You can basically use a single image per “character.” You need to animate things like fire or exhaust coming out of the ship’s engine, but you can find hundreds of stock assets (including free ones), for basic effects like that. The ship itself just needs to move and rotate, and it will look totally fine.
So Flaregate Network’s theme will be spaceship battles, with a 2D art style.
I would like for at least some of the ships to have animated moving parts, for the sake of making them look extra cool, but the fact that it isn’t required cuts down on the minimum required budget for the project by a LOT.
Geometry-Based Animations
The spaceship theme also lets me lean on my math and geometry skills (which are far superior to my art skills) to create “animations” by simply moving and rotating components of ships.
For example, I’ve already built a physics-based death animation system. I define how heavy ship pieces are, and how much force a projectile has, and the system sends pieces of dead ships flying in the right direction with the right amount of speed.
Here’s an example of the death animation system, using free PLACEHOLDER art:
This placeholder ship asset is from https://www.kenney.nl/assets, a great (aka free) resource for prototyping. I want Flaregate Network to have an art style that’s a little less “generic space invaders” than this example, but exactly what I can achieve given my planned budget remains to be seen.
Final Thoughts
After working with the spaceship battle theme for a while I’ve grown excited by all of its possibilities, beyond just the practical cost-savings.
I want Flaregate Network’s cards to draw from an epic and complex universe. What’s more epic and complex than galaxy-spanning conflicts?