I am currently developing a game engine but I'm not quite sure where to find good assets for the graphics… I don't have good enough drawing skills…

I researched the net and found some interesting sites where people offer their assets for free. Is it possible to finish a game with free assets?

What is the usual approach when some amateur like me has programming skills but lacks the graphic part?

Thanks in advance

Of course it's possible, but it requires designing the game around the assets instead of the other way around. Look for the assets first, then design a game that uses those assets.

It depends on what your goals are.

If you just want to make a game really quick to make a buck on Itch, then going for free assets is good.

It gets foggy if you're trying to pitch your game to publishers since you have to prove that you have the license over all assets (art, music, and sfx). Most publishers are expecting that you already have an estimated budget for art and animation/music/sfx etc. If you can get a license that you own or can prove that you have full permission to use said assets, then you can leverage your pitch and possibly the budget (bad publishers want to give you as little $$$ as possible to work with, good publishers want to assure that you'll have the appropriate budget that is cost-effective, but not shoestring either).

ferran said:
I am currently developing a game engine but I'm not quite sure where to find good assets for the graphics…

Why do you need assets for an engine?

RamiMorrar said:

If you just want to make a game really quick to make a buck on Itch, then going for free assets is good.

If your goal is to make any money at all from the game, even just “a buck on Itch”, then I would strongly advice against relying on free assets.

You might have a hard time keeping the art direction consistent, but other than that… why not?

ferran said:
I am currently developing a game engine but I'm not quite sure where to find good assets for the graphics

To be clear, you wrote about building an ENGINE and not about making a SINGLE GAME.

An engine needs to be able to handle a variety of graphics assets from a variety of sources. If you're building an engine you need to be sure your code can handle all the tiny little implementation variations that come from all the different sources, tiny differences between Photoshop, Gimp, Substance Painter, Substance Designer, ZBrush, MudBox, and countless others. You'll need assets from as many varied sources as you can find and you'll need to be sure your tools work with all of them.

If you're building a single game, then it's about whatever assets you can find, and as others wrote you build your game around whatever you can cobble together. It can be done, and is commonly done at game jams and other short-term projects.

What the smart guy above me said.

Thank you all for your feedback.

Just to clarify, as some of you pointed out, I'm not actually developping a game engine but the "engine for my game".

I think that my approach will be:

1. finish the actual backend of the game (mechanics, gui flows, game design decisions, etc)
2. use free assets to have a playable demo version, which won't of course look exactly how I want it to look but will allow me to show it to someone else looking for a objective feedback
3. evaluate if it has some selling potential
4. (let's be optimistic!) look for money to hire someone to make the assets I have in mind

Does this developping cycle make sense for an amateur/low budget project?