Making a game look and sound right is difficult, especially if – like me – you aren’t a natural artist or musician. There is a degree of sniffiness around the use of store-bought assets in games that are on sale; in fact, a few weeks ago, I responded to a Reddit thread that was asking what solo devs should do if they weren’t comfortable creating art for their games.
It’s an interesting question because I keep reading about games such as Stardew Valley where the developer is basically a modern-day Renaissance Man and has done everything. Unfortunately, we can’t all be that brilliant, and even those of us who are sometimes bump up against time constraints – we have families and full time jobs, and may not be able to devote our entire lives to a project that may never make its money back. In some cases, unless you are willing to devote a decade to building a single game, trying to do everything yourself could result in a lower quality product.
With this in mind, I answered on the thread that I was a big fan of the Unity Asset Store, and it’s probably worth saying that by extension I’m also a fan of other legitimate asset stores as well. The ability to source graphics, sounds, and music for what is generally a reasonable cost is amazing for a solo developer.
The downside to doing this is that sometimes the game you are building has the potential to be shaped by the availability of the assets, so it’s important to be creative with what is available to you. You don’t want to build an asset flip – you want to use assets in interesting and unique ways to build an excellent game!
The look of Letters & Legends was nailed pretty early in the process, almost as soon as I decided to use cards to represent the player and enemy characters – after all, there are only so many ways you can format a grid of letters. I found some amazing packs of monster assets that I could easily use to build collectable card-style enemies and a couple of different packs of hit animations on both the Unity store and on Itch (which necessitated developing a system that would recognise either animation type and play it in the game, but that’s a different story).
It was important to me that the game worked well on both mobile and desktop, so I spent a lot of time figuring out a system that worked well in both landscape and portrait and in multiple aspect ratios. It largely worked, although I’ve probably spent too much time re-laying out pages or cursing my inadequate code when it came to keyboard and joypad control. I was very happy, though when l came back very late in the project and casually added screen shake and pulsing icons and nothing broke.
I had a few problems with sourcing sound effects. I bought, as many people do, some seemingly brilliant sound packs by a group called Cafofo, which were then removed from Unity’s store for undisclosed reasons, likely due to containing licenced or stolen assets. Unity very reluctantly refunded me, but it took a long time and a lot of chasing, and lots of other people weren’t as lucky, and frankly Unity should feel a lot worse about fraudulent assets being sold on their store.
After that, I had to go and find new sounds, and I was determined that I wouldn’t have the same issue again. I ended up going round a whole bunch of different sites and reading their small print very carefully.
I suppose that, if I had more time, I’d have been more selective with the music that I’ve used. I love all of it, but I never got around to assigning it to specific levels (outside of the tutorial), and some tracks work better than others. The framework I’ve put together does allow specific tracks per level, so maybe one day I’ll go and rectify this oversight.
For a full list of the assets I’ve used within the game, check out the credits page here! Feel free to ask questions or to comment on your own development experiences here! Letters & Legends goes live on PC and Android on 26 April 2024. You will be able to buy it on the Steam store, on the Epic Games store, on Itch.io, and on Google Play. Add to your wishlist today!
