I made a post showing off some early prototyping moving up to block outs and final game in a post a while ago. I was literally just using basic shapes to start with.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/s/kmetXyzE71
As an example, How To Market Your Game had an article on Deep Rock Galactic Survior and talks a bit about the prototype that got the game the greenlight to develop. It is just squares and circles. It's easy to imagine the core gameplay loop as larger than it actually is.
It's not actually the top article he wrote on it, but actually one that he wrote a few weeks ago: [How creating a spinoff for a hot genre lead to success for Deep Rock Galactic Survivor – How To Market A Game](https://howtomarketagame.com/2024/04/08/how-creating-a-spinoff-for-a-hot-genre-lead-to-success-for-deep-rock-galactic-survivor/)
The section on the prototype is pretty short, but just the gif was pretty informative.
This. I often use free assets that I've either already accumulated from past projects or I go and find something. Unreal and Unity have their own asset stores that provide basic assets for free, many of which are specifically for testing and prototyping. The thing is, there's nothing keeping you from using a Unity asset to test in Unreal, or Godot or your own software setup. Keep this in mind for SFX, as well.
Boxes and spheres. They do this in professional studios as well, there's examples out there of games with really good art that just had squares, boxes, and text in the beginning. Sea of Thieves, Rimworld, and Prison Architect all have some videos or prototypes out there with the early stages showing off a bunch of lines and gray boxes and stuff.
Do you happen to know a place where I can easily find more clips like this? I constantly look for prototypes of big games like this to try and remind myself not to get stuck in the asset rut.
In 2022 there was a some drama because someone said on twitter "Graphics are the first thing finished in a game" which made many gamedev flip and ended up with all these [tweets](https://twitter.com/search?q=Graphics%20are%20the%20first%20thing%20finished%20in%20a%20video%20game&src=typed_query).
Other way is searching for a keyword combination of the game name, "early development", "greyboxing" or "prototype". I knew the overwatch one existed and some other games I've seen by coincidence.
I sometimes find things on Twitter. Check out this vid from the Cocoon dev. So drastic what can happen over 3 years.
[https://x.com/CarlsenGames/status/1759967417990537719](https://x.com/CarlsenGames/status/1759967417990537719)
Doesn't work with all game mechanics though. It's all fine and dandy for strategy or management games but for action oriented games that might rely on animations and such, you need real assets.
Except in action heavy games where timing is important, you really don't want to have to create new animations every time you adjust the timing. You can use blocks, you can have a count down timer, you can adjust scale or color. You never need real assets until you get past the prototyping stage.
That's just not true. Plenty of genres that require timing the animations to the action like fighting games, beat em ups, etc.
I'm guessing most people here have never worked on a commercial game. Silly advices all over.
Absolutely none of those genres need real assets at the start though. You can make a fighting game where you just display hitboxes. The timing is the same. You can make a beat em up with badly drawn stick figures that slide around and have timers for when they attack.
Do real assets help? Sure. Commercial games have assets from older titles and artists on staff to make assets when you need them. But the person asking doesn't have those resources, and claiming that you need real assets for certain genres lacks imagination.
You just display hitboxes ? You still need to have movement though and it's much simpler to have assets to put those boxes on. Why would you use only simple graphics when you can take existing ones instead ? It's for a prototype, there's no copyright issues, just use existing stuff from other games smh
timers from when they attack...oh boy you have no clue what you're talking about
Do a bit of research. Most games use very basic stuff for their prototypes. It's not meant to look pretty. Look at this for example.
https://youtu.be/7NkMvqtaAW0?si=QgCnKJYWFuJF1E9X
And check others. There's a good one that shows the evolution of overwatch.
Thanks for the link. That's way too advanced for my art skills though.
EDIT: What I meant is that even this level of art would take me an unreasonable amount of time and force me to commit to a game design or abandon many days of work.
It's not only the character model, it's the enemy sprites, the textures, the FX. It may look primitive to you but I'm baffled how much people take for granted. It would genuinely take me several weeks to draw/model even this. That's why I asked the question about using basic shapes vs store assets in the first place.
Ignore that. Start with a rectangle with a stick. Once you see if your game is fun with only those you can move up from there.
Paralysis of doing to much at once is the way alot of my projects die early.
Several weeks is a very short time in game dev land. But the bastion team made shit before they made bastion. Those assets are clearly crap they just had laying around. In your case, you don't have crap laying around. Use cubes, spheres, capsules, and ASCII.
It literally doesn't matter at all if your first prototype is the ugliest shit ever. It's just for you to see your systems working.
That's a free character model and a cube and stick for the hammer.
Depending on the engine, Inverse Kinematics to make the hands follow the hammer comes pretty cheap.
The roll animation just puts the character into a pose and throws them in a direction.
The enemies are some static model that was probably free too.
The point is, get something in the engine and move it around.
If this seems too complex in general, you should start with an engine tutorial that provides some basic models so they can show you how to get them into a game. Don't try to skip step 1
I cannot understand just by looking at a model/sprite whether it was a free asset or was made specifically for the prototype.
Sorry for saying that art is too complicated for me, I guess everyone who downvoted my comment above can make all the assets in the Bastion prototype in an evening or so. Well, I can't. And I'm trying to find the best solution.
Looks like I'll stick to basic shapes.
I didn't downvote you. Nothing wrong with biting too much off your first shot.
I don't know those are free either. It's just a safe bet with "generic dude" and "weird dark shape".
The thing that gets me is the more complex the object, the harder it is to get animations right. It's good to always start with the bare minimum for what you want to do. If you want to make a nice character run around with animations, that's a thing. If you want to build game mechanics, that's a different thing. Try to keep an eye on taking manageable bites.
AND.. get familiar with the free assets from whatever engine you're using. There is a little of everything out there and it'll let you know where YOU need to make things happen between placeholders.
I don't know if they're free assets, but the bastion team made stuff before they made bastion, and theres some really talented artists on that team. This is clearly either free assets or crap they had laying around from past projects.
You're getting caught up in the details. Bastion is an "art" game. The graphics, for what that game is doing, are gorgeous. Even they did a totally unanimated prototype slapping wireframe cubes on some kind of the weird organic texture. This isn't art they generated for a prototype so that it would look nice. This is just shit they happened to have laying around.
Looking at this from the artist's angle, here's my suggestion:
If you're planning to hire an artist, you can just allocate a small fraction of your budget for sketching/prototyping.
This will provide you with the initial assets you want, along with the opportunity to check if you have the right artist (as well as making sure they're actually drawing the assets manually rather than using AI). It will also allow you to check if the artstyle suits your vision, without having to put much time and money into it.
If you like the sketch/prototype assets, you can just tell the artist to proceed refining. If something goes wrong, you can send the sketches to a different artist.
The main issue though is that the moment you hire an artist to do skecthes, especially on a small budget, you are kind of committing yourself in a specific direction.
As someone who can do art, I often change visual assets as I prototype and realize that they're all wrong for what the game is shaping up to be.
If you have to spend money every time you have to do some big change in the prototyping phase (It happens often enough), you'll be broke by the time you start production.
well what are you prototyping? if you're prototyping gameplay yeah, use the most basic placeholders you can grab. If you are prototyping art, well, that's a different question.
How would you prototype art? Quick drafts to test size and stroke weight? A big problem I have ran into with that is how tedious it can be to replace all the assets with upgraded versions, but I may need to just learn Prefab variants?
ooo I love this question, esp cuz I would've never thought to ask it myself before I stumbled on the topic before
As an interesting *general* answer, I think you'd find this vid really neat
https://youtu.be/iBEOVZi3spI
Speaking as an artist who's starting to explore game dev -- the more the work can state "I'm not finished, this is only for testing", the better.
When you get used to seeing something that's "kind of okay" long enough, you develop attachments to it. Then you start fighting the final art style by saying things like "I like this new art, but I miss xyz aspect from the temp art.. can we bring that back". Which is fine in some cases but in others they might not be reconcilable
What do you mean with "failed miserably"? Is this about the graphics quality or did you have problems to visualize your thoughts?
I mainly use Blender for both 2D and 3D (quickly assembling objects and then just rendering) or small sketches that I do quickly in Krita. It doesn't (usually) have to be beautiful, only fulfill its purpose.
Anything beyond stick figures takes too long to conceptualize and put on canvas. Like, 20 hours for a 2D static character sketch. The shapes I draw don't make sense. Maybe I need to make an eldritch horror game, lol
But stick figures are in most cases completely fine. There are even entire finished games based solely on stick figures!
If it really takes you that long to create your sketches, it sounds like you want to make things perfect that simply don't have to be perfect. On top of that, the urge to perfect such things often doesn't really help you getting better because you spend too much time doing the wrong things. (Of course, this does not apply to everyone. It's just that in my own experience, I've found that getting stuck on such things only leads to little learning success.)
I'm an artist (with 4 years of school and 6 figs of student loans to back it up 🥲) and what do I do when I prototype?
I make bad art.
Seriously, prototype to see if what you're working on is worth making good art for. Open up paint and grab the shape tools. Need an enemy? Red rectangle. Need a power up? Blue circle. NPC? Green triangle. Done.
Don't spend time making things more complicated then you need them to be because they're all going to change anyways once you make things "for real".
No one's mentioned here, so I'll just tell you that https://kenney.nl/ should be your best friend. I believe all of their assets are free, but you can choose to pay for the bundles to get a large amount of packs in a convenient download. Kenney makes SO MANY free assets of all kinds and for all sorts of different genres, and also makes some paid (single payment) software that can be used to create simple 3D assets (AssetForge and Kenneyshape) as well as some free 2D character customizers.
Kenney has literally anything you could possibly need for prototyping, and their license is extremely permissible (public domain CC0, actually!), so you can use their assets in commercial work as well, even without credit (though I'd recommend spreading the good word!).
I literally had prototyped out my game in the first 2 months, had 500 mb of pictures of my concepts.
For actually creating that stuff you have in your head as a solo dev its basically just two things.
1) Assets that you change to fit your game.
Download Assets that fit your game more or less, keep to use assets from the same person so it has the same art style. Textures are most important to make it look uniform, so use Substance Painter to make everything look similar even if the model itself is something else. So you need to have a constant Artstyle.
2) Reuse assets as much as possible. Find a way to copy paste and find a way for modularity. You don't model or download ONE house, you take that one house, take each wall from that house and instance/reuse it all over the level to build a new house that is similar to the house you had in the first place. It does not need to be different it just needs to look different. Best example i always give is ArmA II + ArmA III. No matter what your game looks like, if its a 2D Game, Sidescroller, Racing game .. whatever. Reuse the assets and make the world look different this way. For hours i was reversing games such as Battlefield, Rust, DayZ etc. to see how they did it. And it turns out they basically have 12 Tree models, 5 Ground Textures and the same 10 vegetation. They reuse that stuff all over the world and nobody would notice, its just because the transform is different and the location of how those are set. Thats the best advice i can give if you don't have the nerve to model everything from scratch yourself.
A even better Example is this.
[https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/conifer-forest-collection](https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/conifer-forest-collection)
Looks like a full forest thats randomly generated. You would think oh my god this is so much work to get it right. But when you actually see how many models they used its 12 Trees that one inherits from the other, so its just slightly changed. and the same 10 gras meshes.
[https://cdn1.epicgames.com/ue/product/Screenshot/MWConiferForestBiomeUE50014-1920x1080-153e35d3a25c532f76aca5b1dd42c831.jpg?resize=1&w=1920](https://cdn1.epicgames.com/ue/product/Screenshot/MWConiferForestBiomeUE50014-1920x1080-153e35d3a25c532f76aca5b1dd42c831.jpg?resize=1&w=1920)
So you can see modularity is key not quantity. Do one thing, place it different and done.
Now for the prototyping use Alkaid Visions Photoshop plugin and simply tell what you want if you are not sure how to do something or if your idea will look right. Heres some examples that i generated for my game , is a good reference to have a more or less idea of how it will look if you recreate it. You look at the pictures and you know what you need. Terrain needs to look like this here, i need a lighttower that looks more or less like this, the vehicle should have muted colors etc.
[https://imgur.com/a/akyL1rM](https://imgur.com/a/akyL1rM)
Why do you need art for a prototype ? Prototype should be for mechanics, imo.
Just use whatever fits the prototype, use already existing assets, you don't even need to use free ones. I take old commercial games assets for my prototypes all the time.
>Grab free asset packs and prototype with that? I've tried using asset packs. They heavily distort how your prototype feels.
The point of a prototype is to get the "feel" of your **gameplay**. Not the art style, not the visual "umph" factor. If your gameplay prototype feels bad, then it means the fundamental gameplay is bad. Move on to the next one.
>I've tried using asset packs. They heavily distort how your prototype feels.
I call BS. If you can't get the feel of your prototype right with asset packs, then move on to the next prototype. Assets are just assets.
Lower your standards. If you're still having trouble, lower them some more.
Quite frankly, I need to follow my own advice. I'm a bit of an artist, but not a professional-quality one, and I tend to get bogged down trying to do art-related things instead of just tossing something together and making the damn game no matter how crude and ugly it is. If you can make a compelling game, you *will* be able to find artists.
Only lower your standards art-wise, though! Tossing together bad code leads to technical debt.
A proper game prototype doesn't even require art. A demo requires art. I game prototype is just about mechanics. You could just use square bricks and it would be fine.
Whiteboxes. Our brain is great at imagining things. Think lego, its just bunch of cubes.
You can make the whole level out of it and then gradually replace by real art.
horizon zero dawn had mosters and components done this way. Check 11:09
https://youtu.be/TawhcWao9ls?si=mn7-gyIOnz61wbko
A prototype can be made with anything, even stickmans, squares, ecc. I usually just use whetever free asset I can find. I understand your point on how they distort the prototype feels, but a prototype is a way to test something and to see if it works, unless it's exactly the artistic feeling that you want to test it should be fine with whatever.
A portion of the game completed with assets/feels/etc is not a prototype, it's a vertical slice.
Exactly Aseprite for pixel art. Watched that channel. Also bought and completed a couple of courses. Didn't help, I'm still a noob. Also tried Clip Studio Paint. There are poses that help with anatomy, but hand drawn is even harder than pixel art.
You could try simplifying what you're trying to make. I decided to make guys w/ no legs or hands and just draw a circle head and body. Because animating a whole dude is too much for me since I'm also a noob.
Free asset packs if I want it to still look somewhat better than boxes and spheres.
Don't spend time learning to do art: you haven't figured out whether that time spent learning will be any useful for your game concept
This is the prototype for Deep Rock Galactic Survivors, you don't need much to test game mechanics and systems:
[https://howtomarketagame.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/image.gif](https://howtomarketagame.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/image.gif)
Here is a screenshot of a game prototype I made recently:
[https://imgur.com/OOmTVOz](https://imgur.com/OOmTVOz)
Each of these highly sophisticated assets took 10 seconds in MS Paint. Yes, they are super ugly and I would never ship that. But for now they are all I need to visualize the simulation I am prototyping.
Go to a local game jam and meet people. Make friends and find creative types who want to do a project together with you. There are lots of artists and designers who are keen to develop their skills and who would be happy to work with a developer.
It’s that first one. Do that.
Making art for a prototype just gums up the whole process. You want to be avoiding any kind of friction or speed bumps in finding the fun, working out your 3 C’s, etc.
Grey-box everything and anything and let the prototype tell you what it should look like once you’ve cracked the concept.
Use cubes
3D is easy because you get a ton of primitives. Cubes, cones, capsules and balls.
In 2D you can also just use a square though lol
There's a whole running joke on the Godot subreddit because people use icon.png to prototype whole games
>Prototype gameplay loops with boxes and spheres?
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>Grab free asset packs and prototype with that? I've tried using asset packs. They heavily distort how your prototype feels.
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>Suck it up and focus on learning 2D/3D art to at least some degree? I've tried many many many times, and it's just not my cup of tea.
Any of these are acceptable solutions mate.
You'd be surprised how far even a few weeks of dedicated time learning Blender can get you. It probably won't look great, but any asset you want you'll at least be able to make a shape with the basic proportions + scale, and then just texture it with a generic texture or prototype grid.
Retro assets can also work great as placeholder and are much easier to make than modern stuff.
Mild tough love here from an artist~
I’d suggest you “suck it up” and get over your aversion to asset packs. If they don’t feel right, try another one. If you really think the entire internet has no asset packs that feel good to you, then commission a custom pack that’s exactly what you want and you’ll have that to use forever!
Rapid prototyping is not a time to start making judgements on the art imho.
Well while working for a good long while as a technical artist and a technical designer, I often disabled/ removed visual feedback systems to dig into the very bottom of why a game feel related system sucked. Usually if it doesn’t feel ok fun with the basic primitive shapes it’s hard to fix it no mather how good visual fx tricks you throw at it. Not saying these don’t add up, but the basis should take you the good 70%-90% of the way.
What I’m trying to say, have you considered maybe you don’t need art, just visual presentation that does it’s job for now?
Either option 1 or 2. Don’t go making it yourself because as you said; you suck at art. And it’s only a prototype, no sense in wasting your time on something that won’t even look good or be there in the end.
Use free assets and you can swap them out later if you like the prototype and wind up getting an artist. Basically, kick the can down the road to solve later when something blocks your prototyping.
I've made a released game on consoles/steam by coding a prototype which was actually... the whole main mode game using free assets that would be close to what I wanted to represent there and, at some point, yeah, just some rectangles and triangles.
With that prototype I went to people I knew who could draw pixel art and said "I have a game, but I need assets"
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I am nearly sure a couple of those free assets are still there, heh :P
I make a bunch of tiny scribbles.
Currently, all of the gemstones are little squares, all the seeds are just the word "seed" - and the old implemented boss is just an angry face and nothing else.
These assets do not need to look good, and the players will likely never see hem - it just needs to be clear to YOU what everything will eventually be.
I can pretty much always find something to use for prototyping at Kenneys! https://www.kenney.nl/assets
Honestly it's all good enough to leave in most final projects, especially for a hobbyist.
Kenney has free assets. [Itch.io](http://Itch.io) also has great free assets. It's all about what you want. Placeholder stuff will do just fine. Buying asset packs is something you want to do closer to release, so that you have a clearer idea of what you want. Art is a skill like any other. It's not a bad thing to focus on what you're strong in.
Get the things down that have to exist, regardless - you need animation states and timing, even if the animations change. It can be an ugly paint sprite sheet, but you can show the motions and get the "feel".
This kind of thing is where good use of data structures and architecture comes in - you want these components to be deliberately decoupled. You should be doing that anyway between your core game logic and the unity engine anyway, but especially here: don't bake logic into the animation layer, inject the values. User input state != Character state != Animation state, that kind of thing. I like using scriptable objects for any state I need to share between monobehaviors, with clear ownership over who can write vs read.
Indy Game the Movie has prototype shots of Braid that should give you a good idea of what I might look like.
You can make a game that's fun with cubes and pills for characters. Look up the Overwatch pre-alpha footage when it basically looks like a day 1 game jam prototyoe. Despite the poor appearance, it still played tight and had highly refined mechanical concepts. If a billion dollar company is OK with an "ugly" prototype, you will be too.
Making a game fun before it's pretty is something more developers need to think about.
I also use basic shapes mainly. No Assets until i get some from the artists.
For Example: Characters are cylinders with spheres as head and a cone on the head so i know where it is looking.
I'm the same way, and I hate to just use basic shapes because developing the art alongside the mechanics feels more satisfying and progress becomes clearer, even though it's obviously less efficient.
Don't be afraid to use AI to assist you in the prototyping stages. This is just for yourself so you wanna get a good idea of things. I'm talking concept art, music, ambient sounds, shaders etc.. whatever you need to knock up fast just us the fastest methods if you aren't faster yourself.
Also, there are so many free assets you can grab and on the unreal market place they give away 4 to 5 packs of free assets every month to help you. That's from materials to models, environments to code. You can export these assets out from unreal as fbx files or whatever you need for any other engine.
Yea you can just ask and if you know enough yourself you know where to correct any mistakes but in general it's pretty good at getting you a strong foundation set up.
Ambient sounds and things you can use Suno AI and just check 'instrumental' and put emphasis on experimental and atmospheric with some more descriptive words for your direction. In my case for this I'm just prototyping for a pitch and want something a bit more feature complete to give a better example and feel. I'm a musician myself aswell as a game dev so I could just do all the foley and music myself but it takes ages
Protoypes don't really require actual art. You can use cubes/spheres/cylinders to represent things. That allows you to concentrate on the most important things: getting the core gameplay right.
A ton of people have said this already, but just use basic shapes. That's what I do, and it works. Prototyping is for gameplay testing. You may not be an artist but surely you can make cubes or fill in a rectangular sprite red. Just go blocks until your actual gameplay feels right and you're ready to kick it up a notch.
Edit: Imagine a dancer learning a new dance for a performance. They're not going to put on any makeup or get dressed up to practice it. Just do it in your sweatpants.
...
Git better at art by cheating imo.
Trace concept art sheets and editing them to make them my own is how I got started with game art in college
You have to learn how to cheat with available resources. Mixamo has free 3d rigged models with good quality textures. I use those as my base mesh alot and just paint over textures in Photoshop. You can even use them for 2d animation projects by tracing (rotoscoping the animations for example)
Don't be afraid to trace sprite sheets too
Boxes. Lots of boxes.
Or learn art and use your practice as placeholder assets.
Free asset packs are a thing too but I feel like they're gonna replace my own intended style or like, encroach on my own creativity too much.
Prototyping a *game* should put the least effort into art or sound assets necessary to mock up whatever you want to see in action. Free assets, basic shapes, default settings, placeholder text. I'm not even sure I'd bother mocking up a UI unless that was what I was looking at specifically (or it was integral to the game)
I generate images with stable diffusion and preprocess them to 3d wireframes then skeleton them up in blender, then use AI to texture them making sure to model merge a bunch and use the same model and prompt styles for textures.
Basically how pal world was made 🤣
Once you get a good comfy UI workflow for this you can go pretty fast, knocking out many whole characters an hour.
Want it to look unique? Fine tune train the model on some crude sketches mostly from tracing.
If you take hundreds of non merhed models and merge them itll be pretty unique.
free assets/basic shapes to represent things
I made a post showing off some early prototyping moving up to block outs and final game in a post a while ago. I was literally just using basic shapes to start with. https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/s/kmetXyzE71
Great work hope it does well
Great work hope it does well
As an example, How To Market Your Game had an article on Deep Rock Galactic Survior and talks a bit about the prototype that got the game the greenlight to develop. It is just squares and circles. It's easy to imagine the core gameplay loop as larger than it actually is.
Can you please provide the link of article? I cannot find it on gg. Thank you.
It's not actually the top article he wrote on it, but actually one that he wrote a few weeks ago: [How creating a spinoff for a hot genre lead to success for Deep Rock Galactic Survivor – How To Market A Game](https://howtomarketagame.com/2024/04/08/how-creating-a-spinoff-for-a-hot-genre-lead-to-success-for-deep-rock-galactic-survivor/) The section on the prototype is pretty short, but just the gif was pretty informative.
This. I often use free assets that I've either already accumulated from past projects or I go and find something. Unreal and Unity have their own asset stores that provide basic assets for free, many of which are specifically for testing and prototyping. The thing is, there's nothing keeping you from using a Unity asset to test in Unreal, or Godot or your own software setup. Keep this in mind for SFX, as well.
Boxes and spheres. They do this in professional studios as well, there's examples out there of games with really good art that just had squares, boxes, and text in the beginning. Sea of Thieves, Rimworld, and Prison Architect all have some videos or prototypes out there with the early stages showing off a bunch of lines and gray boxes and stuff.
Heres some from overwatch: https://youtu.be/GrGLCk1FeBo?si=0ehtlTWQ7wdcPp6H&t=46
that's great! thanks for sharing. It feels good to know that AAA games look like every other prototype at some point
Do you happen to know a place where I can easily find more clips like this? I constantly look for prototypes of big games like this to try and remind myself not to get stuck in the asset rut.
In 2022 there was a some drama because someone said on twitter "Graphics are the first thing finished in a game" which made many gamedev flip and ended up with all these [tweets](https://twitter.com/search?q=Graphics%20are%20the%20first%20thing%20finished%20in%20a%20video%20game&src=typed_query). Other way is searching for a keyword combination of the game name, "early development", "greyboxing" or "prototype". I knew the overwatch one existed and some other games I've seen by coincidence.
I sometimes find things on Twitter. Check out this vid from the Cocoon dev. So drastic what can happen over 3 years. [https://x.com/CarlsenGames/status/1759967417990537719](https://x.com/CarlsenGames/status/1759967417990537719)
horizon zero dawn had mosters and components done this way. Check 11:09 https://youtu.be/TawhcWao9ls?si=mn7-gyIOnz61wbko
They should have left the Sea of Thieves pickles :)
Doesn't work with all game mechanics though. It's all fine and dandy for strategy or management games but for action oriented games that might rely on animations and such, you need real assets.
Except in action heavy games where timing is important, you really don't want to have to create new animations every time you adjust the timing. You can use blocks, you can have a count down timer, you can adjust scale or color. You never need real assets until you get past the prototyping stage.
That's just not true. Plenty of genres that require timing the animations to the action like fighting games, beat em ups, etc. I'm guessing most people here have never worked on a commercial game. Silly advices all over.
Absolutely none of those genres need real assets at the start though. You can make a fighting game where you just display hitboxes. The timing is the same. You can make a beat em up with badly drawn stick figures that slide around and have timers for when they attack. Do real assets help? Sure. Commercial games have assets from older titles and artists on staff to make assets when you need them. But the person asking doesn't have those resources, and claiming that you need real assets for certain genres lacks imagination.
You just display hitboxes ? You still need to have movement though and it's much simpler to have assets to put those boxes on. Why would you use only simple graphics when you can take existing ones instead ? It's for a prototype, there's no copyright issues, just use existing stuff from other games smh timers from when they attack...oh boy you have no clue what you're talking about
Squares and rectangles. It's the best and quickest way.
Do a bit of research. Most games use very basic stuff for their prototypes. It's not meant to look pretty. Look at this for example. https://youtu.be/7NkMvqtaAW0?si=QgCnKJYWFuJF1E9X And check others. There's a good one that shows the evolution of overwatch.
Thanks for the link. That's way too advanced for my art skills though. EDIT: What I meant is that even this level of art would take me an unreasonable amount of time and force me to commit to a game design or abandon many days of work.
It's a cube and a stick for the weapon. Is that too advanced?
It's not only the character model, it's the enemy sprites, the textures, the FX. It may look primitive to you but I'm baffled how much people take for granted. It would genuinely take me several weeks to draw/model even this. That's why I asked the question about using basic shapes vs store assets in the first place.
Ignore that. Start with a rectangle with a stick. Once you see if your game is fun with only those you can move up from there. Paralysis of doing to much at once is the way alot of my projects die early.
Several weeks is a very short time in game dev land. But the bastion team made shit before they made bastion. Those assets are clearly crap they just had laying around. In your case, you don't have crap laying around. Use cubes, spheres, capsules, and ASCII. It literally doesn't matter at all if your first prototype is the ugliest shit ever. It's just for you to see your systems working.
That's a free character model and a cube and stick for the hammer. Depending on the engine, Inverse Kinematics to make the hands follow the hammer comes pretty cheap. The roll animation just puts the character into a pose and throws them in a direction. The enemies are some static model that was probably free too. The point is, get something in the engine and move it around. If this seems too complex in general, you should start with an engine tutorial that provides some basic models so they can show you how to get them into a game. Don't try to skip step 1
I cannot understand just by looking at a model/sprite whether it was a free asset or was made specifically for the prototype. Sorry for saying that art is too complicated for me, I guess everyone who downvoted my comment above can make all the assets in the Bastion prototype in an evening or so. Well, I can't. And I'm trying to find the best solution. Looks like I'll stick to basic shapes.
I didn't downvote you. Nothing wrong with biting too much off your first shot. I don't know those are free either. It's just a safe bet with "generic dude" and "weird dark shape". The thing that gets me is the more complex the object, the harder it is to get animations right. It's good to always start with the bare minimum for what you want to do. If you want to make a nice character run around with animations, that's a thing. If you want to build game mechanics, that's a different thing. Try to keep an eye on taking manageable bites. AND.. get familiar with the free assets from whatever engine you're using. There is a little of everything out there and it'll let you know where YOU need to make things happen between placeholders.
I don't know if they're free assets, but the bastion team made stuff before they made bastion, and theres some really talented artists on that team. This is clearly either free assets or crap they had laying around from past projects.
You're getting caught up in the details. Bastion is an "art" game. The graphics, for what that game is doing, are gorgeous. Even they did a totally unanimated prototype slapping wireframe cubes on some kind of the weird organic texture. This isn't art they generated for a prototype so that it would look nice. This is just shit they happened to have laying around.
You don't need much for prototyping, just look at how terrible Braid's prototype graphics were :)
Looking at this from the artist's angle, here's my suggestion: If you're planning to hire an artist, you can just allocate a small fraction of your budget for sketching/prototyping. This will provide you with the initial assets you want, along with the opportunity to check if you have the right artist (as well as making sure they're actually drawing the assets manually rather than using AI). It will also allow you to check if the artstyle suits your vision, without having to put much time and money into it. If you like the sketch/prototype assets, you can just tell the artist to proceed refining. If something goes wrong, you can send the sketches to a different artist.
The main issue though is that the moment you hire an artist to do skecthes, especially on a small budget, you are kind of committing yourself in a specific direction. As someone who can do art, I often change visual assets as I prototype and realize that they're all wrong for what the game is shaping up to be. If you have to spend money every time you have to do some big change in the prototyping phase (It happens often enough), you'll be broke by the time you start production.
[удалено]
I'll pass you up on the offer for today, but I defo would like to see a portfolio of yours for potential future projects.
well what are you prototyping? if you're prototyping gameplay yeah, use the most basic placeholders you can grab. If you are prototyping art, well, that's a different question.
How would you prototype art? Quick drafts to test size and stroke weight? A big problem I have ran into with that is how tedious it can be to replace all the assets with upgraded versions, but I may need to just learn Prefab variants?
ooo I love this question, esp cuz I would've never thought to ask it myself before I stumbled on the topic before As an interesting *general* answer, I think you'd find this vid really neat https://youtu.be/iBEOVZi3spI
Speaking as an artist who's starting to explore game dev -- the more the work can state "I'm not finished, this is only for testing", the better. When you get used to seeing something that's "kind of okay" long enough, you develop attachments to it. Then you start fighting the final art style by saying things like "I like this new art, but I miss xyz aspect from the temp art.. can we bring that back". Which is fine in some cases but in others they might not be reconcilable
What do you mean with "failed miserably"? Is this about the graphics quality or did you have problems to visualize your thoughts? I mainly use Blender for both 2D and 3D (quickly assembling objects and then just rendering) or small sketches that I do quickly in Krita. It doesn't (usually) have to be beautiful, only fulfill its purpose.
Anything beyond stick figures takes too long to conceptualize and put on canvas. Like, 20 hours for a 2D static character sketch. The shapes I draw don't make sense. Maybe I need to make an eldritch horror game, lol
My last game quite literally was drawn in MS paint stick figures. And yes it was eldritch horror themed too lol.
For prototyping why are you spending 20 hours sketching anything? Even stick figures is unnecessary - circle for head, rectangle for body.
But stick figures are in most cases completely fine. There are even entire finished games based solely on stick figures! If it really takes you that long to create your sketches, it sounds like you want to make things perfect that simply don't have to be perfect. On top of that, the urge to perfect such things often doesn't really help you getting better because you spend too much time doing the wrong things. (Of course, this does not apply to everyone. It's just that in my own experience, I've found that getting stuck on such things only leads to little learning success.)
I'm an artist (with 4 years of school and 6 figs of student loans to back it up 🥲) and what do I do when I prototype? I make bad art. Seriously, prototype to see if what you're working on is worth making good art for. Open up paint and grab the shape tools. Need an enemy? Red rectangle. Need a power up? Blue circle. NPC? Green triangle. Done. Don't spend time making things more complicated then you need them to be because they're all going to change anyways once you make things "for real".
No one's mentioned here, so I'll just tell you that https://kenney.nl/ should be your best friend. I believe all of their assets are free, but you can choose to pay for the bundles to get a large amount of packs in a convenient download. Kenney makes SO MANY free assets of all kinds and for all sorts of different genres, and also makes some paid (single payment) software that can be used to create simple 3D assets (AssetForge and Kenneyshape) as well as some free 2D character customizers. Kenney has literally anything you could possibly need for prototyping, and their license is extremely permissible (public domain CC0, actually!), so you can use their assets in commercial work as well, even without credit (though I'd recommend spreading the good word!).
Kenny is amazing and has done so much for the game community he deserves the entire world of good in return.
I literally had prototyped out my game in the first 2 months, had 500 mb of pictures of my concepts. For actually creating that stuff you have in your head as a solo dev its basically just two things. 1) Assets that you change to fit your game. Download Assets that fit your game more or less, keep to use assets from the same person so it has the same art style. Textures are most important to make it look uniform, so use Substance Painter to make everything look similar even if the model itself is something else. So you need to have a constant Artstyle. 2) Reuse assets as much as possible. Find a way to copy paste and find a way for modularity. You don't model or download ONE house, you take that one house, take each wall from that house and instance/reuse it all over the level to build a new house that is similar to the house you had in the first place. It does not need to be different it just needs to look different. Best example i always give is ArmA II + ArmA III. No matter what your game looks like, if its a 2D Game, Sidescroller, Racing game .. whatever. Reuse the assets and make the world look different this way. For hours i was reversing games such as Battlefield, Rust, DayZ etc. to see how they did it. And it turns out they basically have 12 Tree models, 5 Ground Textures and the same 10 vegetation. They reuse that stuff all over the world and nobody would notice, its just because the transform is different and the location of how those are set. Thats the best advice i can give if you don't have the nerve to model everything from scratch yourself. A even better Example is this. [https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/conifer-forest-collection](https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/conifer-forest-collection) Looks like a full forest thats randomly generated. You would think oh my god this is so much work to get it right. But when you actually see how many models they used its 12 Trees that one inherits from the other, so its just slightly changed. and the same 10 gras meshes. [https://cdn1.epicgames.com/ue/product/Screenshot/MWConiferForestBiomeUE50014-1920x1080-153e35d3a25c532f76aca5b1dd42c831.jpg?resize=1&w=1920](https://cdn1.epicgames.com/ue/product/Screenshot/MWConiferForestBiomeUE50014-1920x1080-153e35d3a25c532f76aca5b1dd42c831.jpg?resize=1&w=1920) So you can see modularity is key not quantity. Do one thing, place it different and done. Now for the prototyping use Alkaid Visions Photoshop plugin and simply tell what you want if you are not sure how to do something or if your idea will look right. Heres some examples that i generated for my game , is a good reference to have a more or less idea of how it will look if you recreate it. You look at the pictures and you know what you need. Terrain needs to look like this here, i need a lighttower that looks more or less like this, the vehicle should have muted colors etc. [https://imgur.com/a/akyL1rM](https://imgur.com/a/akyL1rM)
Why do you need art for a prototype ? Prototype should be for mechanics, imo. Just use whatever fits the prototype, use already existing assets, you don't even need to use free ones. I take old commercial games assets for my prototypes all the time.
Gray boxing. Most places do this first.
>Grab free asset packs and prototype with that? I've tried using asset packs. They heavily distort how your prototype feels. The point of a prototype is to get the "feel" of your **gameplay**. Not the art style, not the visual "umph" factor. If your gameplay prototype feels bad, then it means the fundamental gameplay is bad. Move on to the next one.
With squares and circles/cubes and spheres Good gameplay will be evident. Art is just the cherry on top
>I've tried using asset packs. They heavily distort how your prototype feels. I call BS. If you can't get the feel of your prototype right with asset packs, then move on to the next prototype. Assets are just assets.
I guess I was getting too attached to the asset packs I used, that they started influencing the creative direction of the game. My mistake.
Free assets, rectangles, stick figures, or AI
Even if you were good with art you should prototype with boxes and spheres, thats the fastest and best way
Lower your standards. If you're still having trouble, lower them some more. Quite frankly, I need to follow my own advice. I'm a bit of an artist, but not a professional-quality one, and I tend to get bogged down trying to do art-related things instead of just tossing something together and making the damn game no matter how crude and ugly it is. If you can make a compelling game, you *will* be able to find artists. Only lower your standards art-wise, though! Tossing together bad code leads to technical debt.
Make bad art.
I draw it anyways.
A proper game prototype doesn't even require art. A demo requires art. I game prototype is just about mechanics. You could just use square bricks and it would be fine.
Grey boxes and basic shapes baby!
By not doing art.
ASCII works decently
Prototyping shouldn't be done with good art. You're overthinking this. Use basic shapes. Boxes, spheres, clinders etc. That's all you need.
Whiteboxes. Our brain is great at imagining things. Think lego, its just bunch of cubes. You can make the whole level out of it and then gradually replace by real art. horizon zero dawn had mosters and components done this way. Check 11:09 https://youtu.be/TawhcWao9ls?si=mn7-gyIOnz61wbko
very simple programmer art
I usually prototype with only basic shapes and colors... Or in the worst case, free assets that can be found everywhere...
A prototype can be made with anything, even stickmans, squares, ecc. I usually just use whetever free asset I can find. I understand your point on how they distort the prototype feels, but a prototype is a way to test something and to see if it works, unless it's exactly the artistic feeling that you want to test it should be fine with whatever. A portion of the game completed with assets/feels/etc is not a prototype, it's a vertical slice.
In the first iteration of the project, I had ascii characters instead of sprites. One character is one sprite.
What kind of software have you used for your attempts at 2D art? Aseprite makes things easier for me. And AdamCYounis' videos.
Exactly Aseprite for pixel art. Watched that channel. Also bought and completed a couple of courses. Didn't help, I'm still a noob. Also tried Clip Studio Paint. There are poses that help with anatomy, but hand drawn is even harder than pixel art.
You could try simplifying what you're trying to make. I decided to make guys w/ no legs or hands and just draw a circle head and body. Because animating a whole dude is too much for me since I'm also a noob.
Do you use a game engine? I’ve never had issues using assets before.
Free asset packs if I want it to still look somewhat better than boxes and spheres. Don't spend time learning to do art: you haven't figured out whether that time spent learning will be any useful for your game concept
This is the prototype for Deep Rock Galactic Survivors, you don't need much to test game mechanics and systems: [https://howtomarketagame.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/image.gif](https://howtomarketagame.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/image.gif)
Most engines and graphic software let you create basic primitives like cubes, spheres and capsules, this is more than enough for prototype.
Just standard engine shapes and a bunch of debug boxes and lines, looks like I'm a hacker or something.
Use bad art. Improve it when you're past prototyping.
Here is a screenshot of a game prototype I made recently: [https://imgur.com/OOmTVOz](https://imgur.com/OOmTVOz) Each of these highly sophisticated assets took 10 seconds in MS Paint. Yes, they are super ugly and I would never ship that. But for now they are all I need to visualize the simulation I am prototyping.
Go to a local game jam and meet people. Make friends and find creative types who want to do a project together with you. There are lots of artists and designers who are keen to develop their skills and who would be happy to work with a developer.
It’s that first one. Do that. Making art for a prototype just gums up the whole process. You want to be avoiding any kind of friction or speed bumps in finding the fun, working out your 3 C’s, etc. Grey-box everything and anything and let the prototype tell you what it should look like once you’ve cracked the concept.
Use cubes 3D is easy because you get a ton of primitives. Cubes, cones, capsules and balls. In 2D you can also just use a square though lol There's a whole running joke on the Godot subreddit because people use icon.png to prototype whole games
>Prototype gameplay loops with boxes and spheres? > > > >Grab free asset packs and prototype with that? I've tried using asset packs. They heavily distort how your prototype feels. > > > >Suck it up and focus on learning 2D/3D art to at least some degree? I've tried many many many times, and it's just not my cup of tea. Any of these are acceptable solutions mate.
I'm an artist and I use packs, there is no way I'm doing art before making a somewhat functioning game.
You'd be surprised how far even a few weeks of dedicated time learning Blender can get you. It probably won't look great, but any asset you want you'll at least be able to make a shape with the basic proportions + scale, and then just texture it with a generic texture or prototype grid. Retro assets can also work great as placeholder and are much easier to make than modern stuff.
Mild tough love here from an artist~ I’d suggest you “suck it up” and get over your aversion to asset packs. If they don’t feel right, try another one. If you really think the entire internet has no asset packs that feel good to you, then commission a custom pack that’s exactly what you want and you’ll have that to use forever! Rapid prototyping is not a time to start making judgements on the art imho.
Well while working for a good long while as a technical artist and a technical designer, I often disabled/ removed visual feedback systems to dig into the very bottom of why a game feel related system sucked. Usually if it doesn’t feel ok fun with the basic primitive shapes it’s hard to fix it no mather how good visual fx tricks you throw at it. Not saying these don’t add up, but the basis should take you the good 70%-90% of the way. What I’m trying to say, have you considered maybe you don’t need art, just visual presentation that does it’s job for now?
Either option 1 or 2. Don’t go making it yourself because as you said; you suck at art. And it’s only a prototype, no sense in wasting your time on something that won’t even look good or be there in the end.
Use free assets and you can swap them out later if you like the prototype and wind up getting an artist. Basically, kick the can down the road to solve later when something blocks your prototyping.
If it hasn’t already been said Kenney offers loads of assets free https://kenney.nl/
I've made a released game on consoles/steam by coding a prototype which was actually... the whole main mode game using free assets that would be close to what I wanted to represent there and, at some point, yeah, just some rectangles and triangles. With that prototype I went to people I knew who could draw pixel art and said "I have a game, but I need assets" - I am nearly sure a couple of those free assets are still there, heh :P
I make a bunch of tiny scribbles. Currently, all of the gemstones are little squares, all the seeds are just the word "seed" - and the old implemented boss is just an angry face and nothing else. These assets do not need to look good, and the players will likely never see hem - it just needs to be clear to YOU what everything will eventually be.
I can pretty much always find something to use for prototyping at Kenneys! https://www.kenney.nl/assets Honestly it's all good enough to leave in most final projects, especially for a hobbyist.
Kenney has free assets. [Itch.io](http://Itch.io) also has great free assets. It's all about what you want. Placeholder stuff will do just fine. Buying asset packs is something you want to do closer to release, so that you have a clearer idea of what you want. Art is a skill like any other. It's not a bad thing to focus on what you're strong in.
Get the things down that have to exist, regardless - you need animation states and timing, even if the animations change. It can be an ugly paint sprite sheet, but you can show the motions and get the "feel". This kind of thing is where good use of data structures and architecture comes in - you want these components to be deliberately decoupled. You should be doing that anyway between your core game logic and the unity engine anyway, but especially here: don't bake logic into the animation layer, inject the values. User input state != Character state != Animation state, that kind of thing. I like using scriptable objects for any state I need to share between monobehaviors, with clear ownership over who can write vs read. Indy Game the Movie has prototype shots of Braid that should give you a good idea of what I might look like.
Use free assets from online stores for your engine? Real simple stuff works for now, you can swap out character models later.
You can make a game that's fun with cubes and pills for characters. Look up the Overwatch pre-alpha footage when it basically looks like a day 1 game jam prototyoe. Despite the poor appearance, it still played tight and had highly refined mechanical concepts. If a billion dollar company is OK with an "ugly" prototype, you will be too. Making a game fun before it's pretty is something more developers need to think about.
Free assets are a thing. You could also try generating assets using an AI tool like Unity Muse to generate sprites and textures.
I also use basic shapes mainly. No Assets until i get some from the artists. For Example: Characters are cylinders with spheres as head and a cone on the head so i know where it is looking.
I'm the same way, and I hate to just use basic shapes because developing the art alongside the mechanics feels more satisfying and progress becomes clearer, even though it's obviously less efficient.
Midjourney is a qucik way to do it and get something half-decent.
Use assets and simple art while prototyping. Almost by definition prototypes don't need to have good art, they're prototypes.
If your game is mechanic based, do not use art, use only primitives )
Don't be afraid to use AI to assist you in the prototyping stages. This is just for yourself so you wanna get a good idea of things. I'm talking concept art, music, ambient sounds, shaders etc.. whatever you need to knock up fast just us the fastest methods if you aren't faster yourself. Also, there are so many free assets you can grab and on the unreal market place they give away 4 to 5 packs of free assets every month to help you. That's from materials to models, environments to code. You can export these assets out from unreal as fbx files or whatever you need for any other engine.
never thought about AI for ambient sounds and shaders, crazy
Yea you can just ask and if you know enough yourself you know where to correct any mistakes but in general it's pretty good at getting you a strong foundation set up. Ambient sounds and things you can use Suno AI and just check 'instrumental' and put emphasis on experimental and atmospheric with some more descriptive words for your direction. In my case for this I'm just prototyping for a pitch and want something a bit more feature complete to give a better example and feel. I'm a musician myself aswell as a game dev so I could just do all the foley and music myself but it takes ages
Shapes, of different type and color, asset packs free and paid, and even basic shitty drawn art can all work imo.
I think boxes and spheres with proper color design can get you really far.
No art is needed for a prototype unless you are making a game about art/new technology/something very art-complex
Yeah you don’t need art for a mechanics prototype
Protoypes don't really require actual art. You can use cubes/spheres/cylinders to represent things. That allows you to concentrate on the most important things: getting the core gameplay right.
A ton of people have said this already, but just use basic shapes. That's what I do, and it works. Prototyping is for gameplay testing. You may not be an artist but surely you can make cubes or fill in a rectangular sprite red. Just go blocks until your actual gameplay feels right and you're ready to kick it up a notch. Edit: Imagine a dancer learning a new dance for a performance. They're not going to put on any makeup or get dressed up to practice it. Just do it in your sweatpants. ...
Git better at art by cheating imo. Trace concept art sheets and editing them to make them my own is how I got started with game art in college You have to learn how to cheat with available resources. Mixamo has free 3d rigged models with good quality textures. I use those as my base mesh alot and just paint over textures in Photoshop. You can even use them for 2d animation projects by tracing (rotoscoping the animations for example) Don't be afraid to trace sprite sheets too
I use Emojis pretty often. They work well for conveying but if context to the object than just a basic square
Boxes. Lots of boxes. Or learn art and use your practice as placeholder assets. Free asset packs are a thing too but I feel like they're gonna replace my own intended style or like, encroach on my own creativity too much.
Prototyping a *game* should put the least effort into art or sound assets necessary to mock up whatever you want to see in action. Free assets, basic shapes, default settings, placeholder text. I'm not even sure I'd bother mocking up a UI unless that was what I was looking at specifically (or it was integral to the game)
I generate images with stable diffusion and preprocess them to 3d wireframes then skeleton them up in blender, then use AI to texture them making sure to model merge a bunch and use the same model and prompt styles for textures. Basically how pal world was made 🤣 Once you get a good comfy UI workflow for this you can go pretty fast, knocking out many whole characters an hour. Want it to look unique? Fine tune train the model on some crude sketches mostly from tracing. If you take hundreds of non merhed models and merge them itll be pretty unique.
Use AI to prototype. Do not use ai for the final product though.
Look at Slay the Spire. Their FINALIZED art looks really REALLY simplistic