How To Make Graphics Without Being An Artist

If you were to look at the following drawing, you might think it to be the doodles of a 4 or 5-year-old child.  I mean, what the heck is it?  Is it a crazy alligator crawling on a globe?  Is it a bat carrying a piece of fruit?  No and no, it’s clearly a dragon perched atop a magical ball and quite clearly the sad artistic maximum of this 31-year-old man.

A dragon, ferociously perched on top of a magical ball of epic power.

As an artist, I have clearly failed.  But where artistry has failed, geekery has prevailed.  Even with my lack of artistic ability, I am able to take the previous sketch and turn it into the below image:

Making a 3D Level using Blender

Since I am a horrible artist, I figured that it would be much easier to model than to draw.  For this reason I decided to do my first game in 3D.  My game uses a fixed camera view, the camera sits in one place and never moves (except possibly for special effects like camera shake).

Basics

Here is my first level prototype, it doesn’t get much more simple than this.