Working With Marketplace Assets

I'm writing this blog post in the midst of our kickstarter campaign. It's hectic and I needed to calm down for a bit.

People often ask me what assets I use and did I make them all myself and I wish I could proudly proclaim that, YES, I made it all but I can't. I am primarily a Level Designer, that's my background. Now for STARDROP I did much more then just that. I am creating all the game mechanics, I write all the dialogues and I wrote the main story as well as managing everything from the team to the PR and marketing aspects.

I am not a 3D modeller, I dabbled in it but I just didn't have the time to fully invest and I am much better spending my time learning the engine and working on the rest of the game. For STARDROP I bought some asset packs from the Epic Marketplace.

For a lot of developers that would be it, you add in the assets and voila, done but not for me. I am all about a modular approach and customization. I didn't want to end up with a game where people could point at it and say, hey, I know where this comes from. On top of that I wanted STARDROP to have it's own unique look and feel.

Because of that I have manipulated the textures so that it looks more and more unique. On top of that I created my own materials to further customize the assets. This means I created custom textures so I can tweak the base color of a material and further customize the look.

On top of that I also have optimized the materials. The original materials of one of the packs where really heavy and un-optimized and didn't have much customization options at all. I had to spend some time to tweak the textures to use them with my own master materials. Not only do I now have better materials and more options I also have been able to add a detail material on top to create a more visual appealing material.

I hope this blog shows a little bit of how I treat assets from the marketplace to assure that I'm not simply asset-flipping, But rest assured, we have a small dedicated team and we are working towards creating our own custom assets in the form of center pieces and other smaller custom models all to create a more unique look for STARDROP. Thanks for reading

Joure Visser