I am working on my latest game called “Dragons High“.

The game is a 3D Dragon flight combat simulation. It’s meant for the mobile platforms and will also have a desktop build.

I am a programmer and I can do a little bit of art but my art is not really that good.

I have recently learned that in order for me to make games quicker and look better I should buy stock art and models.

The reasons are that finding a dedicated good 3D artist can be hard and expensive and doing the art yourself is cheap but takes a lot of time and is often of poor quality.

However, you can’t always find what you want on the few royalty free art assets websites.

I was working on the GUI of Dragons High and I was in need of a next button.

I modeled a button in Lightwave and rendered it into a 2D sprite.

This was the result:

This is how it looked inside the game:

At first I thought “Who cares, it’s good enough” but then I realized how bad it looks and how a simple button like this can make your game look unprofessional.

I then began looking for some assets to buy but I couldn’t find anything that was an arrow button or a sign that looked suitable for the game.

Then I found this:

It’s not really a sign or an arrow and it has writings on it. But what if I would rotate it by 90 degrees and render it from the back?

After a few rendering tweaks and making it look more suitable for the game(less cartoony) I got this:

This looks like an arrow and is way better looking than what I did myself.

So this is how you can get along on a budget and not give up on quality.

Just try to make the most of limited resources by editing existing assets into things with a different purpose than what was originally intended.

For the sake of completion here is the GUI with the new next button: