But for me the decision is easy: i’d hate to have to let go of creative control, i’m in charge here goddammit! I still take suggestions and ideas and what not but i don’t have to commit nor compromise.

My thinking was to complete a game (or the starter kit i just started) completely with art assets by myself, and then i’ll pay an artist to fill in the blanks. Having all the art assets in place means i just need to overwrite files and the artist will be able to give me an accurate quote.

But then as i started making my own art assets i wondered, if i put in a little more time and effort, could i make it good enough to be able to live with it? Maybe create my own completely quirky artstyle – something that even i can make?

One thing that works are doodles of course. The other thing i do is to make photos. For quite some time i had the idea of making a game with the backgrounds based on the floor around my house, stone, grass, mud, gravel, tar etc. … it’s still a lot of effort to make usable game assets out of photos though and things don’t just naturally fit together or blend well but might be something that could work well for static screen backgrounds or even scrolling backgrounds.

Btw, i like your doodles. But there’s a certain pixelation around them that looks like Jpeg artifacts (maybe they are?), i think it’ll look better if you got rid of those.

Looks like we have a plan.

(And if our plan fails, we simply need to put our skills together, right?)

If that does not work, I’m going to hire an artist.

For myself, I have to hope that developers will want to find someone to specialize in areas for them. My skills are in web design and UI; I’m not a draftsman or animator (though I possess moderate skill in those areas) so my contributions would be in those capacities. Like myself, I’m sure there are a lot of passionate, very skilled and creative artists out there that would love to have the chance to add their flavor to a game, but lack the programmatic knowledge. Finding one with the right passion to match yours could be a serious boon and open up the door to much more involved and polished projects.