The looks of your game is the first thing your potential clients will notice. Not this revolutionary gameplay, nor intriguing story or climatic music. Most of the purchases, especially on the indie market are based on screenshots or maybe trailers. Even more so when it comes to indie games for mobile devices. Most of people considering a purchase won’t read any reviews or comments. They will only look at screenshots and base their decisions on them.
It’s bad news, especially for an indie programmer, who has absolutely no graphics skills. Like me. Basically you have 2 choices.
- Pay for an artist (may be expensive, but may be also worth it).
- Look for free graphics (not only free to download, but also free to use in a commercial product).
I searched the internet for free graphics. And found a few excellent sites. One of them is Lost Garden. It’s a very useful blog for anyone thinking of creating and selling games. Besides there are these free textures, sprites, tilemaps and many more to download there. Absolutely free and also free to use in a commercial product. All you have to do is to mention name of the artist in your game. And that’s it. How cool is that?
So here a few samples of fantasy themed tilemaps. Definitely going to use these in my project.
Infinity Dungeon 