Hello everybody! I'm developing my first big game and almost done with finishing all the mechanics, the only few things that left is some balancing and some enemies behavior corrections. But scince I'm developing it on my own and it's 3rd person shooter the game needs a lot of content such as animation characters environment meshes and so on. And there is a problem: I don't know what to do next. So let me explain situation a little bit better. I was doing very simple games for 3 years when I started game developing and a year ago I decided to create a really big and serios project. So for these year I've managed to create all mechanics balance them and now I got a game that can be played and people (who tested it) enjoy it. The only thing is left is to bring "beaty" to the project. I can model all static meshes for the levels, create some FX, textures and I've even managed to create all enemy characters. So I'm more a programmer than an artist and I simply don't know how to create all other stuff such as animations, player characters and so on. It's realy bad, because for now I can't even show my work to the people, because it's very ugly and poor. And I don't have money to pay artists. So please can you give some advices on what to do in this situation.

For anything in your game, you will always have basically four options:

1. Pay someone to do it
2. Find someone who's happy to do it with you, either for fun if its a pure hobby project, or for a share of revenue. Just as you want to develop your programming skills on the game, there are artists who want to develop theirs. Bare in mind, though, that unless you're paying someone they will likely want creative input into the game design as well.
3. Make it yourself.
4. Find pre-made assets that you can use for free, or for trivial sums of money.

You've ruled out 1, so you are left with 2, 3 and 4. For 2, there are forums here for looking for people to work with you. For 3, you will need to put the time and effort into learning the skills of art and animation; just as you've already done for programming. You can also help yourself by choosing the style of your art so that it requires less skill from you, and so that more of the heavy lifting is done by clever visual effects that you can achieve through programming rather than art assets. 4 is okay for some stuff, but it's usually hard to find assets with a consistent art style. Still, bringing on board these kind of assets can help you fill gaps, provide a clearer idea of how your game will be, and/or provide a starting point that you can then modify to suit your tastes.

Actually I've already choosen an art style and managed to create a good porsion of 3d assets in it. I've put a lot of effort and time in my player character concept (attached picture), but I've never managed to rig it and I'm not talking about animating it. So I set a biggest problems for me:

• Animations
• Rigging
• Complex FX
• Environment detail

So I will try to search for artists who wants to work on this kind of stuff and of course will share revenue with them after realing the game. Hope I will find some.