Every year I get the urge to jump into one of those daily art challenges during October. It’s the perfect month for me, because you can really do anything from Horror to Fantasy to Science Fiction and it all fits the Halloween vibe.

Unfortunately, I also tend to have a heavy workload, and plenty of family stuff, so producing full illustrations can be a little frustrating.

I’ve tried doing Inktober, for example, and made it 3 days before I failed to get something done, and just ended up quitting for the rest of the month.

A few years ago, I did the OctoBit challenge, and found that far more manageable. OctoBit has you do a piece of pixel art every day, and I opted to do a bunch of small pieces that could be hobbled into a collage at the end of the month.

I was considering doing that again this year, but got to thinking about one of my favorite things to do: Make assets for games!

If you have followed me for a while, you know I like to dabble in game development from time to time. I’ve produced a LOT of concept art and even full on sprite sheets for games that never came to fruition, and it’s a bit of a bummer that I’ve never been able to properly share that stuff.

But, what if I made a bunch of assets for a game that doesn’t exist, and just use those as my daily art challenge? I could use the final results and produce a cool mock-up for a game, and share all the individual assets in case someone wanted to take a crack out of bringing the game to life, no strings attached.

The more I thought about doing this, the more I thought that, maybe, there’s other artists out there like me who are rooted more in the game dev side of things, and don’t really feel like some of the other daily art events are in your wheelhouse. Or maybe you are a pixel artist, but don’t want to spend a ton of time making 31 full-ass pieces in a single month.

So I let the idea cook a bit, and I have decided to call it

Assetober!!!!

Anyone who’s looking for a different type of art challenge is welcome to join me on this adventure.

The basic goal is to draw a set of game sprites, every single day, in October.

There’s no strict rules about what that means. You could make a full character animation sheet one day, and a set of level tiles the next. Maybe you just want to do simple 1-frame character designs.

Come up with a game concept that fits a Halloween/horror/fantasy/sci-fi vibe that would fit into any spooky-month gaming session (think of games like Hollow Knight, Castlevania, Luigi’s Mansion, Plants Vs Zombies, Metroid, FNAF, X-Com, Costume Quest, REPO, Grim Fandango, etc etc), and create some of the assets that game might use.

Assets can be pixel art, hand drawn, 3d modelled... anything goes EXCEPT using AI.

And you know what? You don’t have to do one EVERY SINGLE DAY. Let’s get rid of that unnecessary pressure right away. Maybe you just do one every other day, or one a week. Who cares? As long as you’re having fun, that should be all that matters!

I’m also going to advocate for CHEATING! If you know you got stuff going on next month, start TODAY! If you wanna do multiple assets on a Monday and take the weekend off, you can still submit one every day and look super cool. I won’t tell!

The only strict rules are going to be in how you submit these assets.

---- THIS IS THE IMPORTANT SECTION, SO PLEASE READ IT !!!!!! ----

We don’t want a situation where a bunch of people are submitting, what are essentially, WIP images to the art portal every day. If you DO insist on submitting to the Art Portal every day, make sure you uncheck the “Finished Piece/This is Not a Sketch” checkbox so you’re not breaking any Art portal rules.

What we DO want is for you to take all of your assets, and create a proper composition with them. This could be a full-on layout of what your game world looks like, or it could be a fun collage of everything just hanging out in a fun “find all of the stuff” type image. You could even get super creative and make a full on advertisement, or pitch deck for your made-up game.

(If you are an insane person and want to do a full composition every day, then you can get away with submitting those to the art portal daily, but they do need to work as standalone pieces!)

On Oct 31, use the multi-image upload feature of the art portal to submit your full compilation as the main image. If you want to share your raw assets, upload those as secondary images (you may need to combine these into larger sprite sheets to stay within our upload limits). Also, be sure to choose the appropriate Creative Commons. There’s a good chance someone might be interested in using your assets to bring your game idea to life, and if you don’t want that, it’s important to make a note of that.

These rules only apply to sharing in the Art portal itself. We ABSOLUTELY encourage you to share your daily work in more appropriate spaces. I will create a thread in the NG Art Forums that you can share your WIPS in (I’ll pop the link at the top of this post when I do), and you can (and should) definitely share them on all of your socials!

Tag your final submission, and any dailies you share, with #Assetober and #Assetober2025 so we can find you!

Examples:

Here’s Some Samples from a game I never finished, showing what your daily sheets and finished composition might look like:

Day 1: Assets for the game's main character, Kitty

Day 2: Assets for a little clam baddie

Day 3: Assets for a lil pineapple guy

Day 4: Assets for a menacing snek

Day 6: Some "grass" blocks

Day 7: Some 'dirt' tiles with grassy tops

Day 8: A set of rocky tiles

Day 9: Some sandy tiles

Day 10: An intricate set of background "mud" tiles

Day 11: A collection of classic platformer bricks that can be animated with a shimmer effect

Day 12: Some more detailed brick tiles for building structures

.. etc, etc ...

Day 31: The "composition" piece!

Need prompts to stay focused?

Consider making a daily prompt list! If you come up with a good one, feel free to drop it in a comment.

Here’s a sample one I pulled out of my ass:

Week 1

Oct 1: Create Hero’s idle, walk and jump animations

Oct 2: Create Hero’s attack and death animations

Oct 3: Create powerup/health sprites

Oct 4: Create some attack/damage effects

Week 2

Oct 5: Create level tiles for “world 1”

Oct 6: Create background objects for “world 1”

Oct 7: Create one small enemy

Oct 8: Create another small enemy

Oct 9: Create a mid-sized enemy

Oct 10: Create a large enemy

Oct 11: Create the first boss

Week 3

Oct 12: Create level tiles for “world 2”

Oct 13: Create background objects for “world 2”

Oct 14: Create one small enemy

Oct 15: Create a mid-sized enemy

Oct 16: Create another mid-sized enemy

Oct 17: Create a large enemy

Oct 18: Create the second boss

Week 4

Oct 19: Create level tiles for “world 3”

Oct 20: Create background objects for “world 3”

Oct 21: Create a mid-sized enemy

Oct 22: Create another mid-sized enemy

Oct 23: Create a large enemy

Oct 24: Create another large enemy

Oct 25: Create the third boss

Week 5

Oct 26: Create level tiles for final level

Oct 27: Create last boss’ first form

Oct 28: Create last boss’ secondary form

Oct 29: Create last boss’ final form

Oct 30: Create minions/protection sprites that help the final boss

Final day:

Oct 31: Use your assets to create a final composition and upload it to Newgrounds!