I want to make my own video games, but as of now I still have a few key questions that need answering.
I will be developing this game completely on my own, so I will need to be highly efficient with my workflow in order to make any significant progress.
Currently I am debating either going with the Godot Engine and using pixel art visuals and mainly relying on my digital illustration skills (which is my main area of expertise), or choosing Unreal Engine 5 for it’s amazing tech that allows beautiful photorealism, creation of realistic characters in metahuman, lots of assets ready in the asset store and PCG stuff as well for environment building.
I want my game to also be very accessible for modding and changing by myself and my customers. That made me think it would be best to do a simple pixel art 2D side scroller game, which would be easy to run, easy to mod and hopefully easy to produce.
However if I actually could reasonably make my game work in beautiful photorealistic (more or less) 3D, including animation, special effects, etc. then that would be quite a dream as well.
(I am just a bit worried about modding in that case, since 3D skills from animation to modeling and texturing, are all a bit harder to acquire than in 2D pixel art…)
That lastly brings me to the question of assets bought in digital art asset stores (for games or illustrations).
Is every commercial license sort of different? What do I have to watch out for when using commercially licensed assets I bought in my illustrations / games?
Sorry for the massive wall of text, but this is really important to me and I want to learn as much as I can before I work on my game plan!