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I love making software. I also love sharing that experience with others. I explore it all in this Podcast, from apps to games and in between. From developers just getting started to professionals. We all have something to learn and share with others on our journey.
What's up everybody? Welcome to another episode of the UI Buzz podcast. I'm your host as always Peter Whidham. You can find me and this podcast at peterwhidham.com. In this episode, I'm gonna talk about some pros and cons of using pre built assets.
Peter:Now for starters, for those of you who don't know what a pre built asset is, I'll give you a quick example. There are plenty of places out there where you can buy pre built assets. They usually come in packs and they would be things like for example, you would have like say a temple pack that would have all the things you might expect that you would need to build like a temple level in your games. So like walls and floor, maybe some objects like, you know, burning torches and maybe some old chests, you know, those kind of things. Right?
Peter:I I think you get the idea. Or it might be like a science fiction pack of spaceships with different types of spaceships that are pre built ready for you to use with variations and and that kind of thing. So that's what I mean by pre built assets. Now there are some pros and cons and I'm gonna put forward both sides of the argument here because I know there are differing opinions out there and they are all valid. Now let's start with the pros.
Peter:Okay. I'm gonna give you an example again. As I am learning to build my endless hurdles game, 3 d version in Unreal Engine, I am spending a lot of time obviously learning how to do things, how to build the game, the business logic, the user interaction, the controls, the animation, all of those kind of things. So what I don't need to be doing is spending my time necessarily at this stage building things like walls and floors and ceilings and things to jump over and all of those kind of things. So that's that's one win right there.
Peter:It saves me the hassle of having to learn how to do that if I don't already know. Maybe I don't know how to make 3 d models and texture them and all those kind of things. Well, great. This way I don't have to, and I can stay excited about learning how to use my engine of choice to build the game that I want. Along with that, it saves a lot of time because you can just take these prebuilt assets.
Peter:You can incorporate them into the level in your game or however you're gonna use them and just quickly build out something that not only gives you an idea of how to lay out your levels and prototype everything very quickly, but it also looks a lot better if you are maybe not a designer or something like that. Right? And it can look very impressive and you can feel good about it. It's you feel good about showing it to people when you have these professional level quality assets in there. And again, you know, that way it looks great.
Peter:You don't have to worry about that and you can focus on the core of what you need to get done. So that's a couple of pro examples right there and they're also very reasonably priced. I think a lot of the time, if you check out things like humble bundle, for example, you keep an eye on that site. They regularly off massive bundles of quality assets that you can use, be them visual or audio, whatever it may be, at a very good price. And sometimes you're supporting charities too, which is again a great thing.
Peter:Right? So that's three good reasons to use them right there. Mostly focused around productivity and allowing you to focus on the things you need to learn if you are in an area where you're not familiar with an engine or even how to build a game, things like that. Right? So it's also it's a good motivational way to deal with these things.
Peter:Now what are the downside? What are the cons? Well, okay. Number 1, you may well end up building something that looks like something somebody else has built because you both used the same assets. Yeah.
Peter:That happened. You know, it's up to you how you feel about that but you will inevitably probably get people comment and say, oh, this looks just like whatever other game. Right? That that's a one downside. Now you can get around that, of course, by editing these assets yourselves to make them different, but, you know, at the core of it, they will look like potentially something somebody else has used.
Peter:The second one is, yes, you will not learn the skills of how to build those assets necessarily. You could reverse engineer them later on, but it's not the same as learning how to build them. For example, as I said earlier, maybe at some point you need something that's not in that asset pack or you wanna change something that's in there to something you need it to be and now you've got to learn the skills to go do that. I do think that's beneficial in the long run, but maybe that's not something you need to deal with. However, that can be a downside.
Peter:Right? The learning curve comes later. And then number 3, of course, is potentially there's a cost value involved here. Now you'll know my opinion on this. Right?
Peter:You should invest in the work. You should invest in the things you make and the skills that you gather along the way, like I've said before about courses on how to make things and all of that kind of stuff and supporting those content creators out there to to help them, if they are helping you. So, you know, there's 3, downsides right there. Which side of the equation you fall on is entirely up to you. You've got to figure that out for yourself.
Peter:My up to you. You've got to figure that out for yourself. My personal thoughts on this is there is nothing wrong with using pre built assets because I very quickly want to get to a point, where I have something that's working that I can either look at myself or where I have something that's working that I can either look at myself or hand off to some other people and get feedback to say, is this something I should pursue as an idea? Am I heading in the right direction? Should I scrap this idea completely or do I need to change something and get that feedback a lot quicker than if I had to spend the time figuring out how to build all of the parts that go into my games.
Peter:So that's some thoughts there. I wanted to put it out there because I, you know, just recently been thinking about this a lot as I have been building, like I say, my Ender's hurdles game, and I thought let's go with some pre built assets for the backgrounds. We get the backgrounds that I want that look nice and impressive and I can focus on refining the game engine itself and then maybe go back later on, replace those assets with my own ones, something like that, But it very quickly gets me to a prototype and gets me to a place where I know whether I should pursue this or or go in a different direction or just abandon it completely. Love to hear your thoughts on this. You can reach out to me.
Peter:Go to x right, at uibuzz or you can go to peterwidham.com and reach out to me there. Love to hear your thoughts. If you wanna come on and talk about this, hey, by all means, I love having conversations and chatting with people. I've done a lot of interviews on my Compile Swift podcast and I would love to have some with game developers on here who know an awful lot more about these things than I do and I think we would all love to learn from you. So there's an open invite for you.
Peter:That's it folks. This has been helpful. You know what to do. Go tell someone about it. You can also, buy me a coffee.
Peter:You can go to peterwidham.com and buy me a coffee, to say thank you for the content and help support the podcast. That's it. See you in the next