Make Beautiful Art for Your Game even If you suck at It!
Are you A Solo dev drowning in art,code,marketing and music or maybe someone from a programming background with art that looks like a 5 year old went wild on MS paint ! Today I am going to give you some actionable steps , beyond the usual just practise more bro bullshit. Lets be Honest ,games that look like that dont get much unfortunately but dont worry you dont need to an artist to make your game look good ,I was in the same boat when I started development for my game Acord and managed to create something that looks like this , not AAA but stylish and decent! Here are some simple tricks I discovered which can help you out THE MINDSET You need to be what I call CREATIVELY LAZY so , the truth of the matter is you cant draw shit ,so you need to constantly think of ways to make up for this . When in doubt say to yourself whats the laziest way i can make this look good ? I didn’t pick the sketchy art style in Acord because I loved it. I picked it because it was: 1.Easier to draw 2.Easier to animate 3.Didn’t require crazy painting skills It saved me hours of effort — and it actually looked cohesive once applied to everything. So here’s the key: Don’t aim for beauty — aim for consistency and ease. Pick a style that works with your skill level, not against it. it can be as simple as stick figures , it can still look good if you make it cohesive and consistent 2.RELY ON THE GAME ENGINES make up for your shitty artskills with some game engine magic Modern game engines like unity and unreal have features to add beautiful lighting , post processing effects and other crazy stuff like shaders, normal maps , particle effects ! and these arent that difficult to do I would urge you to look into these techniques and design around them , instead of relying on ur ability to draw let the engines do the heavy lifting please like here are some of my games with and without any game engine magic THE ILLUSION OF DETAIL What makes a game from looking average to amazing , its the details each little thing matters . Now a solo dev or a small team cant out detail a Studio so you need to create an illusion of detail How you do that is using textures got a boring looking wall , just slap on a texture , combined with normal maps and lighting you got urself something that looks awesome! Now with chat GPT image generation this got so much easier ! each element in this is just simple shapes with a texture slapped onto it ,the ground is just a rectangle with a floor texture , the wall is just a rectangle with a wallpaper and crack texture and so on 4.COLOR THEORY now this is the one thing you cant escape from ,choosing the right colors is arguably the most important thing to make ur art look good . now following the first principle i managed to escape this lmao , but i would recommend these youtube videos to learn about color theory after these practise , simple shapes + some color theory can go a long way Here you go spilled all my secrets ! now make some epic looking stuff and you can share it with me at satvik730gupta@gmail.com
Are you A Solo dev drowning in art,code,marketing and music
or maybe someone from a programming background with art that looks like a 5 year old went wild on MS paint !
Today I am going to give you some actionable steps , beyond the usual just practise more bro bullshit.
Lets be Honest ,games that look like that dont get much unfortunately but
dont worry you dont need to an artist to make your game look good ,I was in the same boat when I started development for my game Acord and managed to create something that looks like this , not AAA but stylish and decent!
Here are some simple tricks I discovered which can help you out
- THE MINDSET
You need to be what I call CREATIVELY LAZY
so , the truth of the matter is you cant draw shit ,so you need to constantly think of ways to make up for this .
When in doubt say to yourself whats the laziest way i can make this look good ?
I didn’t pick the sketchy art style in Acord because I loved it.
I picked it because it was:
1.Easier to draw
2.Easier to animate
3.Didn’t require crazy painting skills
It saved me hours of effort — and it actually looked cohesive once applied to everything.
So here’s the key:
Don’t aim for beauty — aim for consistency and ease.
Pick a style that works with your skill level, not against it.
it can be as simple as stick figures , it can still look good if you make it cohesive and consistent
2.RELY ON THE GAME ENGINES
make up for your shitty artskills with some game engine magic
Modern game engines like unity and unreal have features to add beautiful lighting , post processing effects and other crazy stuff like shaders, normal maps , particle effects ! and these arent that difficult to do
I would urge you to look into these techniques and design around them , instead of relying on ur ability to draw let the engines do the heavy lifting please
like here are some of my games with and without any game engine magic
- THE ILLUSION OF DETAIL
What makes a game from looking average to amazing , its the details each little thing matters . Now a solo dev or a small team cant out detail a Studio so you need to create an illusion of detail
How you do that is using textures
got a boring looking wall , just slap on a texture , combined with normal maps and lighting you got urself something that looks awesome!
Now with chat GPT image generation this got so much easier !
each element in this is just simple shapes with a texture slapped onto it ,the ground is just a rectangle with a floor texture , the wall is just a rectangle with a wallpaper and crack texture and so on
4.COLOR THEORY
now this is the one thing you cant escape from ,choosing the right colors is arguably the most important thing to make ur art look good .
now following the first principle i managed to escape this lmao , but i would recommend these youtube videos to learn about color theory
after these practise , simple shapes + some color theory can go a long way
Here you go spilled all my secrets ! now make some epic looking stuff and
you can share it with me at
satvik730gupta@gmail.com
