Starting up a 2d assets site project, guidance appreciated

[RobertBrooks]

Hi everyone I've been working on an asset site for the past year and am reaching out to the dev community to see if they wouldn't mind voicing a few opinions about the site.

The basic idea is to create a really large asset listing which includes a huge amount of assets types, from generic stuff like weapons, tiles, backgrounds etc.. to things most people won't even need in their game like toilet roll icons for example (you never know what people are gonna make). I'll be working my way through the dictionary and trying to create everything over the coming years.

All the art is more or less in one similar style, high resolution cartoon like vector style, so devs won't have a problem with conflicting art styles which can happen when using mixed artist's work when indies can't afford to pay an artist. There's lots of free assets on the site too, they're not all free but I keep prices extremely low and assets start at 10 cents, actually and most are under 45 cents. I the idea is to allow indie devs to create a game a decent looking game without spending a fortune on assets, and also allow them to cut their production time in half.

At the moment the site hasn't got many users due too lack of promotion on my behalf (I prefer drawing) and it's newness, so I haven't really got a large user base to ask so I'm asking around for peoples advice on gamedev forums. I'd really appreciate any advice that anyone has to offer on the following subjects.

What type of perspective do you use for your 2d games - side scrolling, full-top-down-, top down zelda style or isometric- ?
does anybody here ever use stock assets?
would you be hesitant to use an animated character from a stock site for risk of originality?
if you visit the site does it look trustworthy?

I totally aware that I'm scrounging opinions here and feel a bit shamed for doing so, but the site doesn't make enough money for any serious market research and the only investment I can put into this project is my time and ability.

I almost forgot! The link to the site is http://www.gamedeveloperstudio.com

[Rishavs]

Some feedback:

Your landing page is not useful. Decide which asset type is your major draw. Assuming art assets are the major draw, i will make http://www.gamedeveloperstudio.com/graphics/index.php as the main landing page for the site. Ask people to register when they hit the download button. Your landing page makes it seem like i need to register to even browse which will lead to huge loss of conversion.

In fact I will remove all categories altogether. Use tags instead. Art is tagged as art, sound/music as such. Let me filter from a large list.
Think how ecommerce websites work. Copy from Amazon/ebay etc. They all have the same basic design.

Increase the list size. I can just see 4-5 rows of assets at a time. I'll suggest going for infinite scrolling.
It will make browsing much more pleaant. on the cons side, it will increase your bandwidth usage.

Most early users will be freeloaders and moochers like your truly. How do I see all free assets? why not add a tag for free/paid and let me use the search field/filters to see all free assets in one glance.

Remove Register/Login from either main header or menu bar. no point for the links to come twice. The number of items in your menu are intimidating. In fact I'd get rid of the menu bar altogether.

[zorg]

Some feedback to your feedback, Rishavs;

Ask people to register when they hit the download button. Your landing page makes it seem like i need to register to even browse which will lead to huge loss of conversion.

It's possible they already changed to this, since it happened just like this when i went to check out the site.

In fact I would remove all categories altogether. Use tags instead. Art is tagged as art, sound/music as such. Let me filter from a large list. (...) why not add a tag for free/paid and let me use the search field/filters to see all free assets in one glance.

Agreed, but tags could be a bit more diverse, like have tags for isometric / top-down / side-view / oblique art assets, though not much else imo, since that would be a big job to maintain. I do agree with free / paid content tags though.

Increase the list size. I can just see 4-5 rows of assets at a time. I'll suggest going for infinite scrolling.
It will make browsing much more pleaant. on the cons side, it will increase your bandwidth usage.

On the users' side, a big con with infinite scrolling is an ever growing memory consumption; either have a choice for them to decide whether they want to use infinite scrolling or not, or don't force it.

Remove Register/Login from either main header or menu bar. no point for the links to come twice. The number of items in your menu are intimidating. In fact I'd get rid of the menu bar altogether.

I'm sorry but i can't see how one can be intimidated by 6 clearly stated menu points; two main asset categories, one guestbook, one about page and buttons for logging in and registering. That said, having the last two on both bars does look a bit weird to me; but if that's because of some technical limitations between platforms you want your site to support (either browser or mobile issues i'm not aware of), then i won't suggest removing one of the pairs.

Robert:
First, to answer the questions you have asked in your post:
Both for the games i like to play, and the ones i'm trying to create, i don't prefer any one kind of perspective over another; Including ones you didn't list, like any type of Oblique angled ones. I did not use graphical stock assets before, i did use a few nature sounds in some of my compositions though. I would be hesitant to use stock animated characters because of reasons i will state below.

As for the site looking trustworthy, it's much less of a "rad" design than let's say, any of vgresource's sites (like spriters-resource), which i do not think is a bad thing at all.

Now, my main issues are with some choices in wording and the seeming lack of any kind of "real" licenses for the assets, though i will admit i'm not very affluent in any legalities, but from what i've seen, many places use licences others know about, like Creative Commons licenses, not that they are mandatory.
Another thing is that on the about page, the "what can't i do with them" question's answer: "For example sharing on other free stock sites, sharing as a downloadable stock image or sound, or including in a software and/or graphics library."
What would be the definition of that? Hopefully not that the software would be opensource and not obfuscated enough for someone to rip open the game and see the assets inside... like how .love files can be opened relatively easily. At the bottom, you write these:
"You may NOT include assets for direct download from any website, game or any other project.
You CANNOT include the assets in any online or open source library or listing."
So, can one, or can one not use your assets with games they don't want to make closed-source?

[bzSteve]

I was looking for assets to use while prototyping a platform game that I'm working on when I learned about your site. The art is terrific and you have some of the best pricing that I've seen. For $20, I was able to get a lot of stuff. Thanks.

[RobertBrooks]

Hi everyone thanks for some great replies.

I don't actually like the landing page either and appreciate that it is of little use, I mainly use it for explaining what the site is and what my mission is too. I'm definitely gonna make some changes because I certainly don't want people to get the idea that they have to sign up to browse , If that's happening then there's definitely communication error, I'll be looking into that. in fact I probably will turn the graphics index into the main index and move the mission statement somewhere else.

At the moment the site does ask for sign up/in upon download, so it would just be a case of removing the homepage button.

I see what you are saying about graphic /audio category separation at the moment it would be too complicated to make that change and would require a good couple of weeks to code the re organization into the site so I'll have to live with the inconvenience to users at this time . also I don't think I'm going to be producing more audio assets for a long while so that section might be disappearing altogether, I really would have liked to have a good mix but I think I might have been to ambitious at the start.

I've just doubled the amount of thumbnails that users can see on the graphics page to 40 as a quick fix, This is something I'm going to have to look into. I think hybrid infinite scroller might do the trick, 100 - 150 assets per page then a pagination.

The login links are actually duplicate and not because of any technical issues. it's just me being silly! I'll take them out and leave the login bar at the top.

I'm unsure about removing the menu bar completely, How would I order the sites content? a drop down box? yeah a drop down would be neater I suppose. Did you mean this?

I see the lack of a clear license was mentioned! I know it's awful I'm sorry! I can't find a standard licence which applies to what a want, The creative market licence is too tight where as a creative commons licence doesn't cover some of the restrictions I would like to impose although in the end i suppose I'll have to settle for the more restrictive one users might lose some rights but at least they gain clarity. I'm gonna have to fix this first!

Thanks Zorg and Rishavs for taking the time taking the time to write out your thoughts in such detail. It's truly appreciated, I've been working on the site on wholly my own and sometimes its difficult to see things from another perspective, I'll get to work on the next round of changes after I've finished all the current assets I'm working on!

Thanks a lot Steve, I'm glad you your happy with the stuff and thanks for your support!