Honestly, the biggest roadblock for me in gamedev is art. I've always been a terrible artists and sites like OpenGameArt either don't have what you are looking for or have art that was made by someone who clearly doesn't know how sprites work. And even if you do find something, it ends up not mixing well with your artstyle.
Music is even worse. Not that many people compose free to use music for video games. The music selection on OpenGameArt is proof of that. I can't even bother to learn music theory and I don't know how self-taught musicians are able to do it. Not to mention that these musicians sometimes don't make their music loop properly. I've even seen some of them add fucking fade outs in their music.
Now you may ask "why don't you just hire someone?" I'll tell you why, I'm cheap and even then, artists are fucking stubborn from what I can tell. If you don't let them have creative freedom, then they won't work for you. Not to mention that some specialize in a certain artstyle, so it is hard to find the one you are looking for. Also, in this political climate, I don't want to be associated with what any of my artists say, and I have no control over them.
That said, if you have unused sprites, music, sound effects, models, etc laying around, please consider uploading them to sites like OpenGameArt or itch.io.
ひげ
@xianc78 yeah art is a huge challenge. I have paid over a thousand dollars for the art in my game, no joke. I can do little stuff just fine, like sprite editing on a smaller scale, or the blood sprites I just made, but that's about it. I got my art all pretty cheap too, since I personally know 2 of the artists and paid for them in bulk.
I'd be down to shoot you over some music though if you ever need it! :) can't promise too much but I'm always down to do a little bit of shtuff for friends. All I really need is how your game/engine handles looping. There may be songs that fade out but are meant to be looped and just have different loop points for different engines or assume you'll do it yourself. RPG Maker for instance requires you to put tags at certain sample points in your music so it knows where to start and end the loop.
@beardalaxy But thanks for the offer. I'll consider it.
@xianc78 yeah totally! i meant "engine" in more of a way as, your own engine.
the other option is just to have a song that loops all by itself, but then you can't really have an intro, or you have to segue back into the intro pretty well. the title screen music for my game actually does that but most of the other tracks have loop points.
@beardalaxy
>the other option is just to have a song that loops all by itself, but then you can't really have an intro, or you have to segue back into the intro pretty well
That's what I'm talking about. MonoGame seems to only support loop points in WAV files which are mostly used for sound effects. It isn't surprising though, as MonoGame is just an open-source implementation of the XNA API which was created by Microsoft. As for SFML, I don't know. I haven't played around with the audio that much.
@beardalaxy
>All I really need is how your game/engine handles looping.
You already know that I prefer to write my games "from scratch", using nothing more than a language and multimedia library. I don't know if SFML (which is nothing more than a multimedia library) can read loop points. If not, then I have to parse the music file by hand just to look for the loop points (I would've done that if I stuck with MonoGame). It shouldn't be hard though. I would just need documentation on the specific audio file format.