Community Poll: Third-Party Assets

We'd like you to gather some feedback on an important question in the gaming community:

"How do you feel about third-party assets used in games (specifically indie)?"

What are third-party assets?

Anything not made by our team directly is considered a third-party asset. For example, kits you find on the Unity Asset Store, or things from sites where art can be outsourced as a service or purchased as a premade asset.

Why are we asking?

There's sometimes a stigma in the gaming world from folks who might not understand development (or even those who do) when it comes to reusing assets or buying them. It's a common practice, especially for small and/or indie teams like ours.

As a small hobbyist team, we must either spend extra time and recruit extra devs to make certain tools and assets ourselves, or we can use our stored Patreon funding to assist development when truly needed.

We much prefer making our tools and assets from scratch. But, we want to spend more time making great features with a tight-knit team and less time worrying about fitting in some of the more generic ideas that we either haven't nailed a style for yet... or that we don't have enough time/artists for!

What do we find acceptable?

Some things we don't allow, like Stamp designs, generative AI, sloppy assets, or music...

What sort of things do we allow at times?

• Building Material textures (we can't make hundreds on our own!)

• Props meshes (rarely, but sometimes we find a nice asset that can double as a level object)

• Level background assets (these are intensive to make, so buying modular pieces and mixing them with our own helps speed things up, especially for foliage!)

• Player Cosmetics (sometimes artists focus on more unique, custom ideas and don't have time to make the simple stuff like a Sombrero hat. In these cases, we may support another artist by purchasing their model and adjusting it to fit Stuffy and the game's style.)

• Sound effects (like most games, we use some purchased or public sound effects, but these usually get modified for our needs).

What does that look like for our game?

We already use public domain and purchased assets in Restitched, but it's important to us that we balance it with our own content. We are careful not to cross a line where we're using too many generic assets, or to be 'lazy'. We want the game to reflect our talents and be mostly filled with our custom work.

However, it's unrealistic to expect absolutely everything to be custom-made! We rely on either purchased or CC0 (free and public) content at times, like with many of our Building Material textures and sound effects. We've even used a mix of custom and purchased assets to assemble some of our level backgrounds:

If an asset doesn't meet our art style or performance goals, we modify it (if allowed by its licensing). This means we may add extra normal maps over something smooth to give it a consistent detail that helps it fit into the other assets we've made ourselves.

We occasionally also purchase or download third-party tools and shaders. For example, a nice performance-friendly glass shader in Unity. We've also tried new things like Poiyomi shader (a popular VRChat shader for Unity) to get some special effects we otherwise couldn't make on our own.

Your Thoughts...

Even though we already use outsourced and third-party assets sometimes, we're looking to continue doing so. We think this will speed up development, reduce strain on developers, and let us offer more content to you as a player. If done well and sparingly, it's only a win-win situation.

For example, would you rather have a few hairstyles from our artists only... or would you rather have all of that and a few third-party hair models of styles we can't quite pull off ourselves?

It's important to be transparent about the development of things you're supporting and anticipating! This is why we'd like to offer a place where you can learn more about how we're using third-party assets (via Patreon funding) and share your thoughts with us.

Rest assured, though, we will never use third-party assets as a cheap or easy replacement for our work. We only use it when it's truly needed and in the best interest of both devs and players. The goal is to make sure it blends in perfectly with our in-house content and to give nearly everything our own spin, even if it's been purchased.

So, how do you feel about games that use third-party assets?