Where assets come from in Flockbay

Those are two different objections and it is worth pulling them apart. The Catalogue is 60,648 objects you search by name inside the app, with a picture of each, and you put one into a scene at an exact position, turn and size with the mouse. Nothing in it costs money and there is no seller standing between you and it.

What does not exist is the marketplace: no listings, no cart, no per-asset licence to read, no revenue share, no page of top sellers. That is usually what people mean by "asset store", and it is the part we have not built and are not planning to.

The Catalogue matters most in a flat game, where it is the main source of art: 55,073 of those 60,648 objects are sprites, which is 90.8% of the whole thing. The floor of a top down room is painted rather than placed, but the barrels, doors, signs and creatures standing on it usually come straight out of a search.

The old worry about catalogues still holds, though, and it is why this is one route rather than the answer. A menu pulls every project toward the middle of the menu — you can see it in games made from popular packs, where the same rock and the same crate turn up for years. And a catalogue is by definition a list somebody wrote in advance, so a rusted signal box on a narrow gauge railway is not in it, and the search that fails costs you the afternoon. Three more routes exist for exactly that reason.

You describe the thing and it is generated for your project. This is the route that scales, because it does not depend on somebody having made your rusted signal box first. It is also the route that needs your judgement most: the first result is often close and wrong, and the fix is to say what is wrong and go again.

Generation happens over the network. This is one of the reasons Flockbay needs an internet connection while you are building. The game you have built runs locally without one.

Your project is a real Godot project, so it takes the file formats Godot takes. Models, textures, audio and fonts that you already own, bought elsewhere, downloaded from a free library, or made yourself all drop in the normal way.

This matters more than it sounds for people who already have art. An artist you work with, a character you modelled two years ago, a texture set you paid for. None of that has to be recreated to be used here, and none of it is locked to this tool once it is in.

It is also the honest answer to the licensing question: assets you bring keep whatever terms they came with, and that relationship is between you and wherever you got them.

This is the route people forget. A lot of what a world needs is geometry, not art. Terrain, water, roads, platforms, blocked-out buildings, the whole grey box of a level. You build those in the builder by hand and they are finished things, not placeholders waiting for a model.

The same is true of the ground in a flat project, which is painted rather than fetched. You drag to lay cells and drag to erase them, and the tiles, the edges and the collision all fall out of which cells you covered. Nobody supplies that and no search finds it; it is a thing you drew.

For a stylised game this is often the correct final answer rather than a stage on the way to one. A world of clean shapes with good lighting reads better than a world of mismatched downloaded models, and it is faster to change when the design moves.

When you are working this way it is worth being told which route produced a given thing, so you know what you can change and how.

You do not budget for asset packs and you do not wait for a store to stock what your game needs. You search, describe, import or build, and the result sits in your project on your disk in a format Godot reads.

Flockbay itself is a desktop app for Mac and Windows. The download is free with a free plan; Indie at $10 a month unlocks AI assistance, including generation, rather than access to a different library.

The practical risk when assets come from several routes is that your world stops looking like one place. A photoreal barrel next to a stylised house next to a generated character with a different sense of scale reads as a folder, not a game.

Decide a rule early and hold it. One level of detail, one lighting model, one approach to colour. It is easier to make a plain world look coherent than to rescue a detailed one that does not.

This is also the argument for building shapes yourself more often than people expect. Geometry you built matches geometry you built, automatically, and lighting does the rest.

A useful habit is to build the whole area in plain geometry first and only replace the pieces that are letting it down. Most of them will not be, and the ones that are will be obvious once everything around them is settled.