Hoppy Dungeon uses a lot of purchased assets.
That is not a secret, and it is not something I am embarrassed about.
I am building a game, not trying to personally become a modeller, animator, sound designer, effects artist and icon designer at the same time. Buying good assets lets me spend more time working on the game itself: the mechanics, balance, progression and all the little decisions that determine whether it is actually fun to play.
It also does something else that matters to me: it drastically reduces the need to use AI for creative work while directly supporting artists who already make excellent stuff.
That makes it a worthy investment.
The Main Asset Pack Behind Hoppy Dungeon
The largest visual contribution comes from The Complete KayKit by Kay Lousberg.
KayKit provides much of the foundation for Hoppy Dungeon's characters, enemies, weapons, environments and props. It gives the game a consistent visual starting point and saves an enormous amount of time compared with creating every model from scratch.
But buying an asset pack is not the same as dragging a folder into a project and suddenly having a finished game.
Hoppy Dungeon is being built for Apple platforms, and the KayKit models do not arrive as USDZ files. They need to be converted before they can be used in the game. Conversion introduces its own small collection of annoyances: axes can change, models can face the wrong direction, scale and origins need checking, materials do not always behave as expected and animation data needs to survive the trip.
Then there is the work the original pack was never intended to do for this particular game.
Characters need additional animations. Models need adjustments. Weapons need to sit correctly in hands. Some assets need fixes or modifications inside Blender. Character renders used throughout the interface and website also need to be posed, lit and rendered separately.
The purchased assets accelerate development enormously, but they do not eliminate the work. They change the work.
Instead of modelling every rock, sword and skeleton from nothing, I can spend that time adapting a strong visual foundation into something that works properly inside Hoppy Dungeon.
The Other Artists Behind the Game
The game also uses work from several other itch.io creators:
- Clockwork Raven for RPG, skill and interface icons.
- Pixel Boy for additional icons.
- Case Portman for sound effects.
- unTied Games for special effects.
- SunGraphica for UI elements and icons.
Each pack solves a different problem and saves time, but each still has to be selected, integrated and made consistent with the rest of the game. Icons need to remain readable at mobile sizes. Effects need to match the timing and feel of an action. Sounds need to be mixed so they belong together rather than feeling like files collected from unrelated folders.
There is still creative direction involved. There is still technical work involved. There are still plenty of opportunities to make a mess of it.
A Huge Pack Worth Knowing About
Kenney's Game Assets All-in-1 also deserves a mention.
None of it is currently used in Hoppy Dungeon, but it is a massive collection covering an absurd range of game-development needs. If you are prototyping, learning or trying to work out the visual direction of a new project, there is a lot in there to experiment with.
Will People Recognise the Assets?
Other game developers probably will.
Developers spend a lot of time browsing asset stores, so familiar models and icons tend to stand out. That can make using a popular pack feel riskier than it actually is.
Most players do not care.
They care whether the game looks coherent, whether the controls feel good, whether the systems are interesting and whether they are having fun. An original model does not rescue a dull game, and a purchased model does not ruin a good one.
The important part is what you build with the assets. How they are combined, modified, animated, lit and presented matters far more than whether every object began life in a blank Blender file.
Assets Are Tools, Not the Game
Off-the-shelf assets come with annoyances. Formats need converting. Animations need adding. Models need repairing. Visual inconsistencies need smoothing out. Sometimes an asset that looked perfect in a store preview simply does not work once it is inside the game.
Even with all of that, the time saved is enormous.
Buying assets has allowed Hoppy Dungeon to grow faster without replacing artists with generated creative work. It puts money into the hands of people who made something useful, gives the project a much stronger starting point and leaves me with more time to focus on turning those pieces into an actual game.
That seems like a pretty good deal.
