As an indie game developer, one of the key challenges in making your game look good is making sure your assets feel like they belong together. That’s harder than you might think.

AAA studios have entire teams of artists — and sometimes endless budgets. It might not be easy for them either, but it’s certainly easier.

So what do you do when you’re a solo dev or part of a small team?

One common solution is to use asset packs from a publisher like Synty. They’re a New Zealand-based studio known for their clean, stylized, low-poly look. They’ve built a massive library — environments, characters, vehicles, elves, dwarves, aliens, rocketships… you name it.

Synthy offers many high quality asset packs like this one, but gamers often recognize the style immediately.

Using Synty lets you skip a lot of the art burden and focus on gameplay.

The downside? Players often recognize Synty assets instantly — and sometimes mistake your game for shovelware because of it.

In The Orion Project, I chose to mix and match assets from different publishers. Yes, many of them are from Synty — but not all. The mech system, with its modular parts and detail, needed something more sophisticated than what Synty offered.

Image from one of the Mech Constructor asset packs, which I'm using for my mechs in TOP.

But mixing packs led to a new problem: visual style clash.

Even if everything looks “high-quality,” that doesn’t mean it looks good together.

Making your game look good isn’t just about resolution or shader tricks — it’s about visual cohesion. Everything needs to feel like it belongs to the same world.

How do you achieve that?

There’s no single answer. Every team does it differently.

For The Orion Project, I chose to simplify the look of the mechs — reducing stylized detail and tweaking textures to better match the surrounding world. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s already made a noticeable difference.

If you want to make your game look good, make sure your assets feel like they belong together. It's a simple trick that will do far more for your indie game than just fancier graphics.