Hello and Welcome, I’m your Code Monkey!

Something a lot of indie devs struggle with is coming up with an easily replicable but also attractive art style. How do you make things look good?

This is a very important question because nowadays marketing is absolutely crucial if you want to find success, and marketing is all about visuals. A game that looks bad can technically still find success (see Supermarket Simulator which looks super basic), but you will be fighting an uphill battle. So I highly recommend that during your prototype stage you not only prototype mechanics but also different visual styles to come up with something you can build and looks good.

For me, I am mainly a programmer and I definitely don't have much of an eye for attractive visuals, however thankfully I have learned the number one trick to making something look good: Consistency!

Rather than finding 5 assets that are individually super high quality but look like they don't fit together, it is much better to find 5 assets that are all "basic" quality but look like they belong together.

That's part of the reason why I love the Low Poly artstyle so much. You can combine tons of assets from different publishers and as long as they are all Low Poly they will look consistent. That alone will help your game look infinitely better and quickly stand out from all the other beginner game devs.

If you're like me without an eye for visuals the good news is how it is definitely a skill you can learn! I used to have no idea what made something look good, but by working on it and focusing mainly on consistency I would say my games and everything that I produce is looking better and better.

Another thing is how playing with shaders can really help, I made this video a while ago where I basically just applied some interesting shaders to some assets and the results looked really awesome! There’s tons of shaders on the Asset Store and if you just pick one interesting visually unique shader it can basically handle all of your game’s marketing.

For my game Dinky Guardians I used one consistent shader to make everything look similar, and mostly grabbed assets from various Low Poly asset packs. It is definitely not the best looking game in the world but it looks quite decent, or at least it doesn't scream "this is a beginner dev!" which is the first hurdle you must get through.

In more practical terms, lighting and post processing makes a huge difference! I always play with the main directional light settings, create a second directional light for the shadows, add Ambient Occlusion, then I like to add a bit of Saturation and Contrast to make the colors pop, as well as a bit of a Vignette effect and some Bloom. Just adding a bit of lighting and PP makes a massive difference.

The developer behind Farewell North has an excellent video on this topic: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1agSNKuAfTM

So take my advice of prototyping your visuals alongside your mechanics, that way you will have both solid gameplay AND a really solid foundation for all your marketing efforts.

Thanks for reading! Best of luck in your game dev journey!