@oasf
Absolutely!
I’d go even one step further and say that using props correctly and with appropriate amount of taste and forethought is essential in management, where it can save you days or weeks or even months. It is actually good practice, and not doing so is a strategic and amateurish mistake.
Take for example that scenario:
You’re making a game set in modern times where you need whole bunch of modern standard weapons. You come across such pack on market place. It perfectly fits your bill. 20-30 modern weapons, modeled, textured, with materials. etc etc. Ready to use. Price $50 - 200.
But you want to be ambitious and say, nope, I’m not gonna use them, is cheating and makes me look unprofessional, lame and weak in general form. Instead you make exactly the same weapons yourself. Instead of spending $50-200 you spent a month (if you work fast) and at the end of month you’ve came up with exactly the same pack, but instead of buying it for $50 -200 you made it yourself - at least 8hours per day, at least 24 days = 192 working hours (at least), on something you could have bought in 5 minutes and spend additional day or two on modifying it, that is adding custom scratches mark, discoloration etc.
Do you really think game player will say, wait a sec! I saw that AK-47 in some other game also set in modern times and it looked exactly like it. That is, it looked exactly like AK-47, what a lame game it is!!!
Yep, right. It looks exactly like Ak-47 because it is AK-47 and IT SHOULD look exactly the same in any game which uses AK-47 as a weapon model!
I say : Such behavior is unprofessional from the managerial point of view and if you doing so you have your priorities wrong and you really need to do some thinking on how you manage your time and resources.
Anything is doable, possible, manageable. The only problem is time.
is the beauty of the marketplace. And since the asset makers are probably specialists at what they do, even if the typical game developer (usually not a specialized modeler and texturer) worked 8 hours per day for 24 days, the quality of the final product would still be inferior compared to the marketplace asset.
A small team (especially a team of one) can save literally THOUSANDS of man hours by purchasing marketplace assets. And if the team is smart, they can utilize the purchased assets in a unique way to “disguise” the fact they are generic assets, and create a game with a unique look and feel.
Or you can model and texture and code every single thing in your game yourself. And you know what… when you finally finish it, your game still probably wouldn’t even look and feel that unique anyway, especially if you are making something like a zombie first person shooter, which all tend to have similar mechanics.
So to maximize your of uniqueness (if you are super ambitious or have a huge team with lots of cash), might as well go all the way unique and write your own game engine (Epic did to create their game “Unreal”). And your own C++ libraries. Heck, forget Maya and Blender - write your 3D graphics software and model and animate every single asset in your production yourself (Pixar does with 3D software they wrote called “Marionette” and “Presto”). Your game will probably look and feel super unique (although most of us will die of old age before finishing such a game).
My stance exactly. I’m currently prototyping, and I am almost exclusively using prefab assets, either bought or royalty free. I intend to keep some of them in the final product too, or at least the meshes.
I am going for historical realism, so If I want a solingen sword, there is really no room for individual creativity any ways (as the mesh goes).
Can thread PLEASE be moved to General discussion, Just because it’s loosely attached to market place it’s not helping anyone trying to show market place content
While I agree, there is actually a lot of wiggle room in example. For instance Killing Floor benefits from a unique AK-47 model by showing incredibly detailed animations during slow-mo. Including all the moving parts and details required in, say, an AK-47 in Call of Duty wouldn’t make sense.
I don’t think people are in disagreement with you. If you have the skill and – more importantly – the time to make such awesome assets, and the asset will be featured heavily as a core gameplay element (like a slow-mo close-up shot), then it might make sense to lovingly hand-craft such an item.
But usually most of us have to consider deadlines and such. So it probably saves a lot of time and money to just buy the weapon assets that the far-away enemies are holding, or at least the rocks in the background. I sure wouldn’t want to spend even a few hours modeling and texturing rocks if I can get nice looking rocks for cheap or free in the marketplace. Modify the rocks slightly (takes a few minutes) and no one will even notice they are generic assets.
But “Killing Floor benefits from a unique AK-47 model by showing incredibly detailed animations during slow-mo” is a “ORIGINAL CONTENT” not a standard one and as I’ve mentioned it before I would always do original content for myself.
We are talking about generic props. The line is very fine. In one game AK-47 is a generic (and doesn’t matter who made it as long as it looks good), in another game AK-47 is very original content, as you’ve said, with original anims and what not, and of course should be made in house. I always stated that.
Just like any tree for example. If your games in about group of commando running through forest, surely the trees may be generic. But if your game is about trees growing in forest, my opinion is that it is worth to make them “in house”, because that is a original content.
I’ve seen a hell of a lot of textures in AAA and Indie come from everywhere and anywhere, I can’t help but notice CGTextures / Gametexture and Quixel (Ubisoft, Blizzard and Infinity Ward use Quixel for example) maps in anything from the big budget AAA’s right down to the little guys… They use asset stores that’s for sure, SpeedTree is another thing which is like an Asset store product for generating trees. I’m using the terminology loosely here, but it’s in the Witcher, Avatar the movie, Saints row. They are literally all over the place…
Trick is to be smart about it, if you do it right nobody can tell :D…
Well unless you use the products and stare at the texures all day, then you really can… After all it’s simple economics, why go through the pain of creating thousands of meshes and textures which you need pay for people to scan and create. When you have them all handily available to give to your artists for them to simply tweak? Are you going to pay the hundred’s if not millions in staff costs for the extra effort… Or are you going to pay a couple of K for a library?
Simple economics, is how AAA works and it’s finally filtered down to everyone…
