“I just got beautiful game designs for less than $20. What? You’re kidding, right?”

That may be a common reaction for any experienced iOS developer. And it is a valid emotion because when you try to find decent graphics for your game design, you’re slapped on the face with a high cost – between $300 and $1000 on an average freelance platform.

Yes, it will cost you approximately this much if not more to have a freelance game designer create the graphics for you. Some of you may’ve given up on the whole idea of creating your game.

But believe it or not, it is quite possible to create a beautiful iOS game, or any game for that matter without paying a lot of money for the graphics. And no, you do not need to head for blood or sperm banks to get the money. Just kidding. Chill out. There is a way.

I am a young developer myself on a shoestring budget like you, and I came up with a solution that will please everyone of us.

How everything started

I knew I wanted to build a simple game with an addictive gameplay, so I started making a list of what part of the design I needed for my game to work :

- A simple and colorful world

- The design of the main character

- The User Interface design

First, I tried designing those different components by myself, but my design literally sucked.

I was so disappointed that, I did not even try to design the main character, and found myself stuck. Trying to hire a freelance designer wasn’t an option for me (too expensive). At the same time, I couldn’t possibly ship an ugly game to the AppStore. So, what was the solution to get some cool game graphics for an affordable price?

GraphicRiver to my rescue

Well, one day, it was my good luck that took me to a great website called GraphicRiver, and it was the perfect answer to my question. GraphicRiver is a great source of beautiful designs, and it contains an incredible quality of game assets that you can buy from talented designers for a really affordable price (between $5 and $20).

Using the Candy User interface from Fredy Sujono, a talented designer, I came up with a really nice landing page for my app (see below).

This is the first draft of Rolly Candy’s landing page

Then extractig all the elements I needed from the illustrator file provided by Fredy I managed to build my game on a solid User Interface root.

Once the gameplay was ready, I needed to find the design of the main character of Rolly Candy. Browsing on Graphic River again, I discovered a beautiful set from an other talented designer, Anya Droba that I used to design Rolly Candy’s main character, Roller.

Meet Roller, Rolly Candy’s main character

I finally had every designs needed for my game to work (the technical aspects were the easy part), all I had to do was to publish Rolly Candy on the AppStore.

On the road to success

9 days after the submission, Rolly Candy was finally accepted on the AppStore! It got a great start with more than 500 downloads on the first night.

This is only the beginning of the project but this is a great start and I wanted to thanks GraphicRiver for giving me a chance to get great game designs for les than $20!