Hacker News Reader

Comment by dgoldstein0 | Hacker News Reader

This.

The main challenge for building a game is the content - the art, level design, enemy design, terrain, story, etc. The game engines and coding tend to be (a) more portable between games and (b) have more people interested in contributing relative to the need.

I was part of a game design group in college, as an extra curricular. We had tremendous unmet needs for art and sound design, which really limited the games we could make - maybe one or two game the 6-12 projects each year actually had the skills they needed. Part of that was probably the group running out of ACM and thus just having better ability to attract CS than art types, but I got the sense it was partly the type of people interested in building games for fun.

View on HN

A central repository for FOSS scenery, vehicles, buildings, graphics/audio content in general, would help a lot the development of new games. Artists could gather on a public forum to discuss and collaborate, then add their creations to the repository rather than support just a single game, so that developers could concentrate on the code itself knowing they could count on a huge library of assets ready to be added. Think of GitHub/GitLab/Codeberg etc. but for art and media content. Not that one of the above couldn't be used for that goal.

Communities like Sketchfab [1] serve some of these needs. Although not 100% FOSS, ‘content hubs’ like this can be a fun place for creators/artists to share their work — and to potentially get paid — and for others to hunt for high quality assets. Sketchfab was acquired by Epic Games in 2021. [2] Maintaining stylistic consistency from one asset to another is a challenge, however, but maybe upcoming advancements in AI-powered tools like Point-E [3] will enable assets of one style to be re-envisioned en masse into another style. E.g., a text prompt could be “I want all assets from artist X and artist Y to be stylized like the game GTA: Vice City.”

[1] https://sketchfab.com/

[2] https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/sketchfab-is-now-p...

[3] https://huggingface.co/spaces/openai/point-e

There is https://opengameart.org/ . Major limitation to this idea is that for a decent looking game the assets need to be consistent. Not only in terms of art style, but also detail level and technical constraints. For example if you want a modular building parts some random assets created by different artists without targeting a specific game requirements will probably not be compatible with each other or building system in game. Not only 3d model can be too low quality, having too high quality can also be a problem. You don't want some unimportant background prop to consume more triangles than main player character. It may look better to have less and worse quality but consistent assets, than more mixed quality assets.

It might be slightly simpler if you assume realistic 3d art style. But even then what's considered realistic 3d game art has significantly changed over the years.

Maybe this would work better if the repository served not only dumb file storage but tried to establish set of target requirements (updated once every few years) to improve the compatibility assets. Something like opengame-3drealistic-2020 or opengame-2dtopdown-pixelart-v3. Where each category means very specific rules and maybe some reference pieces meant to ensure compatibility. Downside is that it significantly raises the entry barrier and reduces amount of artists willing to make something which fits very specific requirements, instead of making whatever they want and then sharing their work. I am also somewhat concerned about loosing creativity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com