How a Game’s Visual Style Affects Production Costs

When developing a game, choosing a visual style is crucial: creating art can take up to 60% of the budget, and an unsuitable, overly complex, or expensive style can easily “sink” a project. The good news is that today’s players are open to a wide range of graphics—from retro to minimalist—and understand that simple or old-school visuals can be a deliberate artistic choice as well as a practical one.

Choosing a Style
A game’s visual style is guided by its concept—genre, atmosphere, and mechanics—but in reality, it’s often limited by budget. Dreaming of The Last of Us Part II–level graphics while having the resources of Stardew Valley is risky: it almost certainly leads to overspending both time and money.
Budget affects asset volume: the more unique objects, the higher the cost. Animation in realistic games has to be precise, while stylized games allow for simplifications, which saves time. Optimization and testing are also more involved in realistic projects, and even small revisions can affect multiple elements, stretching deadlines. That’s why it’s important to decide on a visual style as early as possible, starting with the basic choice: 2D or 3D.

2D
2D graphics are traditionally considered more budget-friendly than 3D—but that’s not always true. For instance, visuals like Hades, with meticulously drawn characters, smooth animation, and a striking color palette, require a team of skilled artists capable of maintaining high quality throughout the project. Cuphead’s visuals are equally stunning—but to achieve them, the creators had to mortgage their homes and invest personal funds to finish development.

On the other hand, retro styles, like in Vampire Survivors or Blasphemous, can be far cheaper. Pixel art usually doesn’t need complex pipelines, costly assets, or heavy engines. Small teams—or even solo developers—can produce it with just a few artists using tools like Aseprite or Photoshop. Examples include Stardew Valley (a solo development with huge commercial success) and Celeste, where pixel art became part of the game’s emotional storytelling.

The main limitation is artistic skill: even “simple” sprites can look cheap if they aren’t stylistically coherent. Pixel art is economical for basic sprites and simple scenes, but hand-drawn frame-by-frame animation can be time-consuming.

3D
3D graphics vary even more. At one end is the photorealism of Uncharted 4, with a multi-million-dollar budget and a huge team of specialists. Many beginner teams avoid this style—and understandably so: detailed models, complex materials, accurate lighting, and motion-capture animation make it expensive and time-intensive. Even with ready-made libraries and photogrammetry, time is needed for adaptation and optimization—at least, that was the case a few years ago.

Today, photorealism doesn’t have to cost a fortune: modern engines handle many “expensive” tasks. In Unreal Engine 5, Nanite handles high-detail meshes, reducing the need for optimization, and Lumen provides dynamic global illumination, cutting pipeline time and costs. Libraries of scanned assets (Quixel Megascans via Fab) allow fast environment assembly, and MetaHuman lowers the barrier for realistic characters, now built directly into UE 5.6. Unity HDRP also offers tools for photorealistic materials and lighting, and smartphone photogrammetry (KIRI/Polycam) can give a “high-end” look without a AAA-level team, relying on scans, kitbashing, and smart lighting and camera work.

If photorealism isn’t the goal, stylization is a solid alternative. Cartoonish 3D offers a compromise between expressiveness and speed. Simplified geometry, bright colors, minimal shaders, and stylized animation allow content to be created faster than in photorealism. Low-poly style makes it easier to create assets and scale projects without skyrocketing costs. For example, A Short Hike, made by a single person, uses simple shapes with a pixel filter but still feels cozy and atmospheric.

Retro stylization is another option. Graphics inspired by the original PlayStation feature intentionally crude models, low polygon counts, simple textures, and limited colors. This avoids the high costs of modern 3D assets while delivering strong aesthetic appeal: think Paratopic, Buckshot Roulette, or Fear the Spotlight.

Nostalgia works in your favor here: players see the graphics not as “outdated” but as an artistic choice. The result is minimal spending on models and textures compared to realism, while giving the project a unique identity and potentially attracting a wide audience among retro fans.
Stylized 3D in the style of Telltale games, with clear outlines, bright colors, and cel-shading, is still resource-intensive, even though it looks simpler than photorealism. Creating such characters requires careful work on design, rigs, and animation, while the environment needs thoughtfully composed scenes, lighting, and details to make the world feel alive and recognizable.

Even for indie projects with limited resources, developers must plan every element—characters, scenes, objects, and UI—to maintain a coherent style while staying on budget. This approach allows for a bold, comic-like aesthetic that makes the game stand out, but it demands significant effort from artists and animators.

Consider a few popular genres. Suppose you’re making a survival horror game—familiar mechanics can be presented in completely different styles, resulting in very different budgets. There are interesting 2D examples—Darkwood and Detention—both distinctive and stylistically unique.

But if you insist on 3D graphics—and your budget doesn’t cover The Callisto Protocol–level visuals—you’ll need to be clever. Developers of Tormented Souls deliberately made game locations more compact, allowing higher detail in each area; the creators of Signalis chose not to compromise on scale, instead giving the game a retro look reminiscent of the original Metal Gear Solid.

Another example: a platformer. Simple pixel graphics, like in Celeste, can cost around $50,000, roughly an average indie budget. A more detailed 2D game, like Ori and the Blind Forest, could cost around $5 million—despite both being 2D.

When Visual Style Defines the Game
Even with a budget for AAA-level graphics, it’s worth asking: does your project really need them? Often, the visual style becomes the defining feature, shaping player impressions even more than mechanics.
These games are usually made by small teams that don’t compete in “technical” AAA production. Instead, they create a strong artistic language that becomes their signature. Budgets go less to complex systems and more to artists, animators, and sound designers. Classic examples:
Journey (Thatgamecompany) — style, music, and the sense of journey create an emotional experience almost independent of specific actions.

Abzû (Giant Squid) — an underwater exploration game driven by the beauty of the ocean.

Gris (Nomada Studio) — a platformer with puzzle elements, where visuals and color accents literally tell the story.

Inside / Limbo (Playdead) — minimalism and unique style deliver atmosphere so that mechanics feel secondary.

In all these cases, visual style helped the games stand out, attracting press attention, festivals, and awards. But betting on style carries risks. If the art team underperforms, the visuals and atmosphere may fail, leaving the game without support. That’s why aesthetics-driven projects need not a huge budget but a clear artistic vision and strong organization.

Team and Organization
Developing a visual style is a complex process: concept art, models, textures, animations, environments, UI, cutscenes, and more. How many people are needed varies. Lucas Pope created Return of the Obra Dinn entirely solo, helped by stylized retro graphics.

Meanwhile, developers of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 relied heavily on outsourcing for animations—but the final work looks cohesive thanks to strict oversight from the art director, who established a unified visual language. Work formats can differ:

Volunteers: cheap but unpredictable; usually juniors who need mentoring, which can slow things down.

Small senior team (3–5 people): a good option for indie games, though expensive and requiring multi-skilled specialists.

Outsourcing studio: a team led by an art director, possibly integrated into a larger hierarchy (leads for environment, characters, effects + outsourcing managers). Flexible, scalable, and quality-controlled.
Costs depend on region, skill, and workload, but averages emerge. The cheapest 2D option is pixel art: one character takes 1–2 weeks, a level 2–4 weeks, and a full asset set for a small game costs around $5–10K.
Low-poly, popular for mobile and indie 3D projects, is slightly more expensive: one character 1–3 weeks, a level 3–5 weeks, total $8–15K. Hand-drawn 2D, common in narrative games, requires more time and skilled artists: 3–6 weeks per character, 6–8 weeks per level, costing $10–30K for a full set.
Stylized 3D demands serious preparation: 2–4 weeks per character, 4–6 weeks per level, costing $30–70K. At the extreme, AAA-level photorealism is the most expensive: 6–12 weeks per character, 8–16+ weeks per level, with a single character costing $20K or more.
Choosing a visual style is more than “prettier or cheaper.” Modern tools even allow photorealism with small teams, but not every project needs it. Carefully consider which style fits your project. As the examples above show, the same mechanics can work in very different visuals.
For indie developers and small teams, finishing the game matters more than chasing AAA graphics. A completed game with a tidy, simplified style is always better than a photorealistic project lost in production. This is proven by Vampire Survivors, Among Us, Signalis, and others—games that might never have seen the light of day if they had blindly pursued expensive visuals.
Finally, to avoid mistakes in choosing a visual style, remember to consider:
Available resources: honestly calculate budget and time to release.

Idea testing: create one asset in the proposed style to estimate effort.

Scalability: can you quickly add new content?

Gameplay: a minimalist style may be enough if your mechanics are strong.

Revisions: the more complex the style, the higher the risk of getting stuck in long revision cycles.

by Evgenii Park at codastudio.dev