When we were working on Niara: Rebellion Of the King our biggest worry were assets. Sure, we can choose the best genre, the best engine, but where will we get the assets from? Niara being a visual novel RPG required high quality art and music assets.

We could only program and making high quality art and music assets was out of our abilities. So, what should we do when we face such situation? Should we switch to pixel art? Let me tell you something very important here, good quality pixel art takes more time to make than regular art. Yes, this is true. You may make average quality pixel art in less time than you may make regular art but if you want high quality pixel art then it takes a lot more time than regular art.

We also did not have any talent in music. And just making repetitive 8 bit music was NOT a good idea for a game that focuses mainly on the story. So, we had to get good quality music and it HAD to be original.

So what did we do? We fetched for help from our friends. And if you are also an indie studio you should also fetch help from other people. Sure, you will have to pay them and you are short on budget but let me tell you this, art and music is where you should spend money. If art is the blood, flesh and skin then music is the soul of your game. The underlying program is the brain. Nobody looks at the program as long as it functions well. But everybody looks and feels your art and music assets. So spend money on them as much as you can and get the best quality original music and art assets.

We approached our friend Anish Gupta (Instagram: @constellations.illusoires) and asked him to license some of his amazing music to us for our game. He licensed the soundtracks of some songs from his album 'Illusory Awakenings'. Check out his album at Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/artist/1Izru08o7cIpQhcOn3fHZ1?si=EdgNsSXVRUaZ26UTI02_7g).
We licensed the following songs for our game:

1. September Lines
2. Cosmic Home
3. Radial Satellites
4. Incarnation
5. Seus dans l'espace
6. Moonbrakes

You can listen to these songs on Spotify. We requested him to remove the vocal part of the songs as it is not a good idea to include vocals in video game music. He was kind enough to do that and we thank him for this.

We approached and hired Serena Susan Abraham (Instagram: @ahoytherem8ey) for making character art for our video game. She did an amazing work and you can clearly see the high quality character art she made. Check out her Behance ( https://www.behance.net/serenasusa234b ). We thank her wholeheartedly for her service.

So, if you are also an indie studio or if you are just starting out and if you don't have good artists or music makers in your team then it is a really good idea to hire them and spend money on them and these assets. Because art and music is what makes your game look good and stand out. This is what the player sees for the first time so make sure it is as good as you can possibly make it.

Thank you for reading. I hope this article will help you in some way.

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