New game makers often ask how they can make good-looking games when they don’t have any art skills. There’s lots of advice out there on how to get better at art, but here’s some ideas on making simple art that looks good.
For really basic art, How to Make Your Game Look Good if You’re Not a Good Artist from Miziziziz is a good video overview.
An Approach to Game Art for Solo Devs, Small Teams, and Non-Artists has a collection of materials and methods that favour shapes and code transformations over any drawing. (reddit thread) It comes from a talk (summary stolen from here):
- Simple shapes. Squares, circles, triangles.
- Good color choices. Use color picking tools. Use less saturated colors.
- Lean on post processing and other full screen effects to “tie the room together” and make your game look polished and intentional.
- Learn a couple really simple code driven animation techniques to breath life into your characters and scenes.