Although I am a full-grown human man in my forties, I have been regrettably afflicted with the interminable disease known as "you draw like a 3rd grader" since.. well.. third grade. But since I've been trying to make it as a video games developer the past few years, I've had to learn a few tricks to mask my 3rd-grade drawing skills, and elevate my game's visuals to that of a near 5th-grader.

My psychological horse-betting game has been out a couple months, and though it's far from being wildly popular, I've surprisingly had some compliments from friends on the graphics. So here are my tips for those developers who may also be terminally bad at drawing:

1. Hire someone to do it for you. The worst graphics in my videogame were the faces of various animals on the game's playing cards. I hired someone on fiverr to do twelve animal drawings, they came out great, and it costed a little over 50 bucks.
2. Add shading to EVERYTHING. I was surprised how much different a bit of text looks when you simply duplicate it and paste it over itself just one pixel to the left and one pixel higher. Same goes for sprites.
3. Add lots of movement and action to the game. I am not sure if this worked, but I deliberately added tons of movement -- explosions, particle effects, highlighting images (for when the mouse is hovering over an object) -- to distract from my poor visuals.
4. Use the vast network of free-for-commercial-use graphics available on the internet. One such resource is called Pexels. Even copyrighted material can serve a purpose for you if you are a bad artist; you can make an outline of the object in a piece of art or still-frame of a movie, and use it as a template for your own sketch or drawing.
5. Be forgiving of your god-given non-talent. 1. While there's definitely room for improvement as far as my technique goes, I think some of the charm of my videogame comes from the bad drawings of animals, and collage-inspired theme of clipping graphics found on the net.

Feel free to add your own tips or to blast my game art you can find @ https://jot2b.itch.io/chinese-zodiac-animal-race. (Seriously, I would love a good roast!)