I'm decent at guesstimating this stuff. My answer won't be perfect, in fact it could be off by a factor of 2 or 3, but it'll give you a decent ballpark idea about what to expect.
First off, to minimize your costs, I'd recommend sticking with 16x16. In my experience, 32x32 doesn't actually *quadruple* the costs, but it does make them a lot higher. You can also lower your costs somewhat by using flat colors rather than dithering or being overly complicated. Check out the stuff in the LPC Style Guide; I think we found a very good balance there, where we managed to come up with an attractive, high resolution style that's relatively quick and easy to add on to.
So, costs:
You can probably get 90 tiles for somewhere beteween $150 and $300. Just as a suggestion, I'd recommend asking the artist to use the Dawnbringer 32 color palette, which a) looks nice, and b) is becoming fairly widely used, which means you'll be able to mix in other assets and have them look good. All told, for animating 10 characters worth, you may be looking at $500 on the low end all the way up to a couple thousand. The up side of this is that you don't have to round up all the money at once, since it'll take a bit of time to complete them. With large commissions like this, I tend to go by week or month and pay a bit at a time.
On to sprites. It depends on what exactly you're going for, but if you stick with the 16x16 tilesize and make the sprites that size (or just a bit bigger), you can keep things pretty cheap. A cute, simple 16x16 sprite sheet with the things you want would probably be around $75-$150. If you keep your sprites small like that, you can use a 3 frame walk cycle and a single attack frame. If you decide to make your sprites larger (64x32, for instance), you'll need more frames to animate them convincingly, and your costs will spike pretty fast, to probably $400+.
Either way, I would strongly recommend doing a single base (in the case of 16x16) or a male and female base (in the case of a larger sprite) and then having the clothes, hair, and accessories added on to it. This will cost less than doing 10 completely different ones, and then you can make more characters by mixing and matching and changing colors around.
With respect to weapons, most of the ones you mentioned can be done with a single overhand swing animation. The bow is obviously an exception, but that is an easy corner to cut.
So, my final answer:
If you keep costs to an absolute bare minimum, you *might* be able to sneak by for a little over $500.
If you want to splurge a bit, you could probably spend a couple thousand over the course of several months.
Disclaimer: I'm not an expert. Take this response with a grain of salt, and don't get your hopes up too much about doing it for $500. It will probably be a bit more.
What Clint said about $10k minimum matches my calculations almost exactly. :)
Assuming you want to do something cel-shaded like Skullgirls, you're probably looking at $50 per frame on the low end. Counting up the frames that Cammy's sprite uses in Street Fighter, I came up with just about 200. (Note: ripping these sprites or using ripped sprites is illegal unless you have permission from the game creator; the above link is included to illustrate what I'm talking about.)
That being said, if you want to go with a pixel art style, you might be able to do it for somewhat cheaper. The Street Fighter characters are (from a quick glance) less than 100 pixels high. I've paid as little as $150 for pixel art sprite sheets, however, there are a couple of caveats:
I've never commissioned anything over 64 pixels high. Past that, things start getting expoentially harder and (by extention) more expensive.
None of the sprite sheets I've commissioned have had more than about 50 frames of animation, and generally somewhat less.
Street fighter sprites are way more complicated. In a lot of the sheets I've commissioned, many of the frames are similar enough that they can be created by copying a frame and then editing it, rather than redrawing the frame from scratch. However, if you look at the link above, you'll notice that Cammy's motions are very dynamic, which requires a lot of each frame to be redrawn from scratch. It's possible (and even quite likely) that she was cel animated first (at the same cost that Clint mentioned) and then converted to pixel art by hand.
So, in short, if you don't mind taking a hit on quality, you might be able to get an experienced pixel artist to put together a smaller sheet with less moves and vastly simpler animations for $300 (miniimum) or so, but regardless of the artist's skill, there just isn't a way using pixel art to approach the quality and fluidity of the Street Fighter sprites without spending a lot more money.
That being said, I don't think there's anything wrong with being realistic for your budget. Your game doesn't have to have street fighter quality animations to be fun to play, and the sprites themsleves can still look nice. You might be able to find an artist who can help you at that cost.
Disclaimer: IANAPA (I am not a pixel artist), so my prices are guesstimates based on what I've commissioned in the past. $300 may be low, but you could certainly do it for under $1000 per sheet, if you're willing to cut the corners I mentioned.)
So, finally, a brief word on 3D characters. A high poly 3D character model can cost around $2000 or more. I'm not particularly familiar with how much it costs to animate them. but I'm guessing that if you're looking for something like in modern fighting games, it can get really expensive. Regardless of whether you use motion capture (in which case, you'd have to hire acrobats and martial artists who can pull off the necessary moves convincingly) or 3D animators, but either way, to get the animations looking right, it would require a lot of testing and tweaking, which can really add up. Most likely the animation process costs more than the models do.
Again, though, you can cut costs on this. Low poly models can be had for significantly less money; you might be able to get one rigged for $300-500. After that, you could do the animations yourself if you don't mind the tedium and the fact that it's just not going to be as good as if a professional does them.
So, in conclusion, I don't think it's necessarily *impossible* to make a Street-fighter-like game on a shoestring budget, but to actually match SF's animation quality and number of moves, you need a lot more than that. What's interesting is that the difference in cost between a really ugly looking game with programmer art and a decent looking game may only be a thousand dollars or so, but the difference between a decent looking game and a really professional one that feels smooth and fluid can be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
One last thing: There's a slim possibility that you may get really lucky and attract a large fan base. If you do that, you might be able to harness the time and talent of your fans to improve your game over time; however, even with very good games, this is a rare occurrence.
I'm getting Metroid flashbacks, particularly from the first one. :)
Yay puppet warp. :)
Another try:
Looking at it zoomed out, he already looks like his upper body should be much bigger.
Hi!
I'm decent at guesstimating this stuff. My answer won't be perfect, in fact it could be off by a factor of 2 or 3, but it'll give you a decent ballpark idea about what to expect.
First off, to minimize your costs, I'd recommend sticking with 16x16. In my experience, 32x32 doesn't actually *quadruple* the costs, but it does make them a lot higher. You can also lower your costs somewhat by using flat colors rather than dithering or being overly complicated. Check out the stuff in the LPC Style Guide; I think we found a very good balance there, where we managed to come up with an attractive, high resolution style that's relatively quick and easy to add on to.
So, costs:
You can probably get 90 tiles for somewhere beteween $150 and $300. Just as a suggestion, I'd recommend asking the artist to use the Dawnbringer 32 color palette, which a) looks nice, and b) is becoming fairly widely used, which means you'll be able to mix in other assets and have them look good. All told, for animating 10 characters worth, you may be looking at $500 on the low end all the way up to a couple thousand. The up side of this is that you don't have to round up all the money at once, since it'll take a bit of time to complete them. With large commissions like this, I tend to go by week or month and pay a bit at a time.
On to sprites. It depends on what exactly you're going for, but if you stick with the 16x16 tilesize and make the sprites that size (or just a bit bigger), you can keep things pretty cheap. A cute, simple 16x16 sprite sheet with the things you want would probably be around $75-$150. If you keep your sprites small like that, you can use a 3 frame walk cycle and a single attack frame. If you decide to make your sprites larger (64x32, for instance), you'll need more frames to animate them convincingly, and your costs will spike pretty fast, to probably $400+.
Either way, I would strongly recommend doing a single base (in the case of 16x16) or a male and female base (in the case of a larger sprite) and then having the clothes, hair, and accessories added on to it. This will cost less than doing 10 completely different ones, and then you can make more characters by mixing and matching and changing colors around.
With respect to weapons, most of the ones you mentioned can be done with a single overhand swing animation. The bow is obviously an exception, but that is an easy corner to cut.
So, my final answer:
If you keep costs to an absolute bare minimum, you *might* be able to sneak by for a little over $500.
If you want to splurge a bit, you could probably spend a couple thousand over the course of several months.
Disclaimer: I'm not an expert. Take this response with a grain of salt, and don't get your hopes up too much about doing it for $500. It will probably be a bit more.
What Clint said about $10k minimum matches my calculations almost exactly. :)
Assuming you want to do something cel-shaded like Skullgirls, you're probably looking at $50 per frame on the low end. Counting up the frames that Cammy's sprite uses in Street Fighter, I came up with just about 200. (Note: ripping these sprites or using ripped sprites is illegal unless you have permission from the game creator; the above link is included to illustrate what I'm talking about.)
That being said, if you want to go with a pixel art style, you might be able to do it for somewhat cheaper. The Street Fighter characters are (from a quick glance) less than 100 pixels high. I've paid as little as $150 for pixel art sprite sheets, however, there are a couple of caveats:
So, in short, if you don't mind taking a hit on quality, you might be able to get an experienced pixel artist to put together a smaller sheet with less moves and vastly simpler animations for $300 (miniimum) or so, but regardless of the artist's skill, there just isn't a way using pixel art to approach the quality and fluidity of the Street Fighter sprites without spending a lot more money.
That being said, I don't think there's anything wrong with being realistic for your budget. Your game doesn't have to have street fighter quality animations to be fun to play, and the sprites themsleves can still look nice. You might be able to find an artist who can help you at that cost.
Disclaimer: IANAPA (I am not a pixel artist), so my prices are guesstimates based on what I've commissioned in the past. $300 may be low, but you could certainly do it for under $1000 per sheet, if you're willing to cut the corners I mentioned.)
So, finally, a brief word on 3D characters. A high poly 3D character model can cost around $2000 or more. I'm not particularly familiar with how much it costs to animate them. but I'm guessing that if you're looking for something like in modern fighting games, it can get really expensive. Regardless of whether you use motion capture (in which case, you'd have to hire acrobats and martial artists who can pull off the necessary moves convincingly) or 3D animators, but either way, to get the animations looking right, it would require a lot of testing and tweaking, which can really add up. Most likely the animation process costs more than the models do.
Again, though, you can cut costs on this. Low poly models can be had for significantly less money; you might be able to get one rigged for $300-500. After that, you could do the animations yourself if you don't mind the tedium and the fact that it's just not going to be as good as if a professional does them.
So, in conclusion, I don't think it's necessarily *impossible* to make a Street-fighter-like game on a shoestring budget, but to actually match SF's animation quality and number of moves, you need a lot more than that. What's interesting is that the difference in cost between a really ugly looking game with programmer art and a decent looking game may only be a thousand dollars or so, but the difference between a decent looking game and a really professional one that feels smooth and fluid can be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
One last thing: There's a slim possibility that you may get really lucky and attract a large fan base. If you do that, you might be able to harness the time and talent of your fans to improve your game over time; however, even with very good games, this is a rare occurrence.
What was the process for texturing that horse? Did you use photos, or is it all digitially painted, or some combination thereof?
That is one of the more random internet in jokes I've come across. :)
To be safe, if this is a reference to the SCP Foundation, this may need to be licensed CC-BY-SA, per their wiki guidelines.
Voting is always the week following the date the challenge ends.
As for the four winners, I believe once the voting ends, those will be reset. Let me know if you happen to notice that they aren't.
Bart
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