(Shout-out to every software developer who ever inherited a legacy project, took one look at it, and decided “I should rewrite all of this because I don’t like how it looks right now.”)
So, I’m back in on the game development hobby. Just as I predicted in my January update, all the recent Switch games I played got me revved up and full of energy to do some game making of my own—and then, with that foundation primed, inspiration struck me at the exact right time with a game idea that I think is pretty darn cool and would also probably take years to fully develop. (Sorry, vaguely conceived competitive multiplayer platformer, you just weren’t the right idea for the right time. Maybe in the future—the far, far future.)
But for now, since I’m back to square 1 with game dev, and since I’m still painfully aware of my limitations when it comes to, well, everything that goes into it (i.e., all the art and music, since I at least have a solid foundation for the programming and writing)—I find myself asking various flavors of the question, “How much do I want to build a game completely from scratch, vs. the potential of using some free/licensed assets that an actual artist made specifically for people in my position?”
It’s a question that goes a lot deeper than art/music assets.
My game engine of choice is Unity, despite the whole Runtime Fee drama in 2023, and despite even more drama as recently as last week about the future of the engine. I like Unity because its GameObject/Component system feels pretty intuitive to me, very much unlike Godot’s Node-based approach. (But I’m very happy for the people who find Godot more intuitive than Unity! I want them both to succeed.)
But sometimes I’ll also start thinking about how the Unity Engine would add a bunch of bloat that my games wouldn’t need. (At least, I assume that when I build a near-empty Unity project and the resulting .exe is already 30+ MB, a lot of that is the bloat of things like, physics engine code that isn’t ever used because it’s an empty game.) And then I start thinking, maybe I could follow in the footsteps of ConcernedApe, the creator of Stardew Valley, and develop my games with the MonoGame framework.
If I did that, I’d pretty much have full control over the code of my games. But, it would also mean I’d have to spend a few years re-implementing basic things that Unity would have taken care of for me entirely. Basic graphics and audio handling, collision systems, heck even physics in general if I ever want to go back to that platformer idea. But then what if I want to add multiplayer to that platformer? I guess I just need to hope I’m a good enough programmer by that point that I can handle it all myself?
Nope. That’s a LOT of pointless reinventing the wheel. I’ll just stick to Unity for now, which still has tons of community resources and plugins and tools, including for multiplayer.
Okay, so that’s one layer of the question answered. What about art?
The day I had my big game idea, I went and impulse bought a bunch of 2D pixel art game assets on itch.io. (In my defense, I had already known some of them were on sale, and some of those sales were going to end in just a few hours!) Of course, I haven’t used any of them yet (whoops, my knack for getting hyped over tools is still going strong it seems), but I’m quite happy to have them as a fallback option. And also, I’m happy to have them as a resource for getting started with learning to make pixel art.
I think for this new attempt at a game dev journey, I want to do it with my own artwork. I want to toil through making a grassy/forest tileset in Aseprite, down to picking the colors in the palette myself, so that when I put a finished product together—whether its a sample project I make in a week to test out a new game feature I want to practice with, or whether it’s the big one that’ll take me years—I want to be able to look at it and think, “I made everything I’m looking at here,” and be proud.
Remember the junky blocky platformer I showed a gif for during my last gamedev-venture? It had a generic animated rotating 2D coin sprite in it. I made that coin sprite and animation myself, over the course of literally multiple nights in Aseprite’s animation editor. (It took so long because I’m that bad at art, currently, but also because I get distracted very easily.) I’m still so dang proud of that stupid coin sprite, even if it’s nothing special to anyone else. For me, that coin sprite is some kind of metaphor for perseverance. It’s proof that, if I put in the time and the effort, I can make something that looks good.
Of course, this time I’ll be doing a lot more research on color theory and hue vs saturation and how color palettes work and just artistic design in general. I’ve got a lot of reading and practicing I need to do, but that’s all part of the fun for me.
Anyway, that’s another layer of the question answered! How about music?
While I’d love to be able to go full ConcernedApe or full Toby Fox, and make literally everything myself, from the code to the art to the music, at some point I gotta draw the line and recognize there’s only so much time in a day. (Especially since this is only a hobby! I’ll be doing all this in my off-time.)
Honestly, if I ever get as far as actually needing music for a game, I’d be thrilled to commission a musician to make a full soundtrack! God I love game soundtracks. Before I recently played Cassette Beasts, I had known about the game for a few years already, but I had next to no interest in playing it myself—until I heard its absolute banger of a battle theme, which immediately convinced me to get the game and then I fell in love with the rest of its soundtrack. Zero regrets.
Of course, that’s so far away that it’s barely worth thinking about right now. Not while I’m still at the level of “learning how to draw blades of grass in MS Paint,” practically speaking.
And now that I’ve procrastinated another hour away by writing this post, it’s time to get back to drawing blades of grass after picking good shades of green. Wish me luck!