6 Tips for LOW BUDGET Game Development
180In this video I will share my tips for low budget game development to help you save some money! You can easily make a 0 budget game, but you can go a lot further with a small budget used efficiently.
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How much does it cost to make a game? // List of game development costs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn34cfKDkSc
0:00 Intro
0:58 Utilize free assets if possible
No money to make a game? Luckily there are many places on the internet where you can find free assets to use. All it takes is some googling to find these places and then see what they hold.
When downloading free assets, just be careful to check what kind of a license they are released under. Many licenses will require you to give proper attribution to the creator and some licenses can even prohibit you from using the assets in commercial products.
If you want to be sure you are only getting assets you can freely use, you can try searching for cc0 assets, which means they are licensed under Creative Commons 0, which gives you the right to do pretty much anything you want with the asset.
2:04 Use asset stores
Asset stores are the best asset for a modern indie game developer and enable game development on budget. You can find pretty much everything in them: graphics, audio, code, tools and even ready-made games. All this for a very low price usually.
You might now be wondering: “but if I use an asset store, won’t my game look and sound like everyone else’s game?”. No, it won’t. Not if you do it in a smart way. Your main character probably shouldn’t be a ready-made asset. But nobody cares if the trees in your game are lovingly handcrafted by yourself or if you spent a few dollars to get them from the asset store. You can also modify the assets to make them unique.
Don’t be afraid of using asset stores. They will save you a lot of money and time. This is the #1 way how to reduce game development costs
4:35 Carefully consider what you are making
Carefully consider what type of a game you are making. Mostly what type of graphics your game will use. Different types of games cost a different amount of money to make and graphics is usually the biggest determining factor for the cost.
A game with flat low-resolution pixel art costs a lot less to make than a realistic 3D game. If you are just starting out with a shoestring budget, some genres and graphical styles might not be the best choices for your first game because of this.
Before you make any final decisions on the outlook of your game, consider what type of art you will need and how much of it you will need. It might be a good idea to also ask a few artists for prices so you can estimate the cost-factor early-on.
5:32 Prioritize your use of money
If your budget is very limited, carefully consider what brings the most value to your game. In principle this tip might be obvious. But often in practice you are kind of flying on auto-pilot and it takes a conscious effort to put things into perspective.
When thinking about spending money on something, some good questions to ask yourself are:
-Would I be able to do this myself?
-If so, how much time will I save with this?
-Is the time saved worth the price?
-Will the average player notice this?
-How much do I expect this to improve the enjoyability of my game for the average player?
-How much do I expect this to increase the sales of my game?
If your budget is limited, it is important you are prioritizing its use correctly. For every game the prioritization can be different. But usually prioritizing graphics is never the wrong answer as that is what draws players in to try out your game.
6:46 Use your assets efficiently
Use the assets you have efficiently. This can mean different things, but the principle idea is that if you are using your existing assets efficiently, your need for new assets is lesser.
A very simple method of this is recoloring or slight customization of your existing assets to create new assets. Another more interesting form of this is modularization. Instead of buying 100 unique assets, you can buy just a few, split them into parts and with the help of some procedural generation code, arrange and combine those parts into new unique assets.
Using your assets efficiently can enable you to do some cheap game development!
7:59 Have good specs for artists