Animation and Graphic Design Choices

Question

I'm a college student who has learned to program. I have a game that is just wrapping up, and my graphics and design team is (Freshman) spotty. I'm planning for the worst, and would like recommendations for animation and design software that a programmer can easily pick up and use with no longer than 8-10 hours to learn it. If you could post a couple down below and a brief description of what it can do, that would be great. I will post my specifications below.

• Working on Unity
• Broke... Like College students are. I can put down a little money though
• I will be creating a lot of sprite 2D images
• I will be making somewhere around 2-5 animations depending on how well I pick up on it.

I do have Blender, but I cannot figure out how to color things on it. I barely figured out how to design an explosion.

Answer 1

Using of graphical tool can't make your graphical design and art better. You have to be an artist or learn to. So you can go with 2 ways:

1) Try to be an artist (it's hard long way full of risks). You need much time for practicing with ANY tools (pen and paper are good for the start). When you be able to create amazing things you find tools very quickly.

2) Focus on programming or game-design and use simplified design styles (baby-painting, hand-writing with pen, flat-design) or even use technical sprites like simple geometry. When your game will be almost finished you can hire an artist to redraw your art. It is much easier when your have all necessary image lists and even images with right ration and resolution. Just redraw them and put in your game and game is ready for production.

What I'm trying to say? Don't try to compete with your average graphics. Today's market is full of hi-quality games with amazing graphics. Impress gamers with your cool ideas and gameplay and may be they forgive you bad graphics. Anyway you have many options:

1. Make your game with technical images first and then will see what to do next (best option)
2. Use free images under creative commons license (it's difficult to gather full set of images in unique style)
3. Use primitive graphics that gamers forgive you (your game must be very cool)
4. Hire a professional artist (best option if you have money and finished game)

Regarding animations - it's pretty easy to avoid drawing each frame. You can transform your objects in Unity so that your scene will look vivid with standard Unity features

Sorry that I don't suggest you concrete tool, but I want to save your time and energy to encourage you making cool games, not fighting with tools that are useless for non-artist.