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[jrjellybeans]

Hey all,

I contacted one of the artists about our latest game The Old Fairy Wars. 

You can find a very ROUGH demo here:

http://jrjellybeansgames.com/theOldFairyWars_v0_0.exe

To make a long story short, currently, it's a 2D platforming game in the spirit of Castlevania and is running with a window size of 1024 X 768. 

The smallest size of a block in the game is 60 X 60 pixels.  The main character is 60 X 120 pixels.

Basically, the artist I spoke with told me that it was too much work for the artist to do at the current size (I was looking for an artist to all of the art [characters, bosses, backgrounds, etc.] within a 2,3, or 4 month period.)

He told me that it would be unrealistic to find an independent artist who was willing to work that and that I would need to find a professional artist and pay him.

I can reduce the size of the characters in the game fairly easily (it would just take some time).  Obviously, since the size is already in place, I'd like to keep it.

My only real concern about the art is that it "looks good."  I don't really care too much about sizes - I just care more about finding someone who can get it done with no payment up front.  Even after completion I'll pay them, but nothing near what they could probably be getting.

So:
1.  Is 60 X 60 pixels too big of a base size for an artist to work with within this time frame?  If it is, what size would be better?
2.  If it isn't then how would I go about finding an artist who would be willing to complete the work?  The artist told me that most people on the site deal with retro / smaller art.
3.  I should also mention that we're using Game Maker to program it, although I'm pretty sure that speed won't be too much of an issue as we feel pretty confident that it can be optimized.  Does anyone else have any other thoughts on this?

Thanks in advance!

[Nate Kling]

Doing all the artwork and animations for a game the size of castlevania in 4 months is pretty ridiculous at any price unless you found someone to work full-time.  Even then it could be near impossible depending on how big you want the game to be, how many enemies, how smooth of animations you want, and the style of artwork.  Its all pretty relative depending on how many tiles, enemies/characters and animations you need.  If you're looking for a 60x120 realistic character with a lot of detailed animations that could take a lot of time to do.  Then you have to add on all the enemies that will take just as long to do.  It really depends on how big your game is and the quality you're looking for.

[jrjellybeans]

Caliber,

What about, for example, if I had a character that was:
25 X 50 pixels
A walking image would be 6 frames

Enemies, at largest, would have an image sequence of about 4 frames.  Most enemies are pretty simple.  Usually, the largest image they would have would be walking back and forth (which would use 4-5 frames).
60 % or so are as big as the player or SMALLER.
Right now at least 70 % of them have simple movements:
stand still = 1 frame
get ready to attack = 1 frame
attack = 1 frame

Would that more realistic to be completed in 4 months?

In addition, the game isn't the SIZE of Castlevania.  It's just in that style of gameplay.  To give a rough estimate, it be nice to have 7-8 level settings each containing 2 large backgrounds and a single set of tiles.  The tiles are relatively simple - think of Super Mario World (SNES).

It looks like the game window will have to be reduced to 800 X 600 as well...

[alspal]

I think you could reduce the size of this to at least 800 x 600 or 640 x 480.

[hatu]

Sounds like an insane amount of (realistic) graphics to do. You could think of a more abstract style or a less detailed "cartoonier" look if you want to keep the resolution.

[Sewje]

If you know exactly what art you need done and keep animations to minimum its easily achievable.
But it probably is gonna be a full time thing.
If you are going to pay the at the end of the project anyway why not offer the payment spread through the 4 months.

You'll get so many more artists to choose from that way.

[LemonScented]

This kinda feeds into a question I was thinking of asking at some point, but seeing as this thread exists already, I might as well pitch in here

I've heard it mentioned a few times before that higher resolution 2D art is more work. I can see how that could be true for pixel art, but is it also the case for "non pixel" art, something that's done in Photoshop (or GIMP, or whatever the artist is comfortable) that doesn't involve direct control over every pixel?

I'm more yer coder/designer type than an artist, and I've seen this crop up a few times, and I'm kinda mystified. In 3D, you'd never hear an artist complain that the models you'd ask them to make are "too high poly" - the difficulty for 3D artists is in reducing the number of polygons to fit into the processing budgets of the engine. With tightly-controlled pixel art, there's more pixels to control than with bigger sprites, but making small sprites appear clearly must also come with its own challenges.

If I were to approach an artist with a defined tileset, and set numbers of animation frames, what's the extra work involved in making the tiles 64*64 rather than 48*48 (or for that matter, 128*128 if the art style dictates non-pixelly painterly art)?

[BlueSweatshirt]

It's simple. Pixel art doesn't scale itself. So size is problematic. The bigger the size(usually) the more detail required to look appealing.

16x16 tiles would be simple and easy. But 32x32 tiles are effectively four times the work. 64x64 tiles effectively eight times the work, and 128x128 tiles are effectively 16 times the amount of work.

With scalable graphics, this isn't exactly true. Even though things also typically require more detail the bigger they are, adding such detail is usually much easier. Directly due to the fact you're not working with and manipulating each and every pixel.

[MrLollige]

It's simple. Pixel art doesn't scale itself. So size is problematic. The bigger the size(usually) the more detail required to look appealing.

16x16 tiles would be simple and easy. But 32x32 tiles are effectively four times the work. 64x64 tiles effectively eight times the work, and 128x128 tiles are effectively 16 times the amount of work.

With scalable graphics, this isn't exactly true. Even though things also typically require more detail the bigger they are, adding such detail is usually much easier. Directly due to the fact you're not working with and manipulating each and every pixel.

I don't know how you calculate, but if you spend just as much time on detail as you would with a 16x16 tile, a 32x32 is 4, a 64x64 is 16 and a 128x128 is 64 times the amount of work!

[LemonScented]

It's simple. Pixel art doesn't scale itself. So size is problematic. The bigger the size(usually) the more detail required to look appealing.

Right, but what I'm trying to get at is whether that's an inherent problem/feature with the pixel art approach/style, or whether that's true for any approach to 2D art.

If you take a game with a non-pixel-art style (off the top of my head I'm thinking of stuff like World of Goo, Samorost, Machinarium, Braid, Aquaria, Castle Crashers etc, where either the source art seems to have been hand- or digitally- painted, or comes from photo composites, or is in a generally "cleaner" more vectory style), is it still the case that doubling the resolution would quadruple the workload? Or is it not as much of an increase in workload with those styles to just create higher-resolution assets in the first place?

[jrjellybeans]

It's simple. Pixel art doesn't scale itself. So size is problematic. The bigger the size(usually) the more detail required to look appealing.

Right, but what I'm trying to get at is whether that's an inherent problem/feature with the pixel art approach/style, or whether that's true for any approach to 2D art.

If you take a game with a non-pixel-art style (off the top of my head I'm thinking of stuff like World of Goo, Samorost, Machinarium, Braid, Aquaria, Castle Crashers etc, where either the source art seems to have been hand- or digitally- painted, or comes from photo composites, or is in a generally "cleaner" more vectory style), is it still the case that doubling the resolution would quadruple the workload? Or is it not as much of an increase in workload with those styles to just create higher-resolution assets in the first place?

*** I just answered this question, but basically reiterated what everyone else said in more detail... ***

To answer your question directly, from my understanding, changing the size of non pixelated art work, of course, increases the work load slightly, but not as much as pixel art.

I do think it's because of the inherit nature of pixel art.  In addition, maybe people aren't usually as comfortable with pixel art than art with say a tablet.

Pixel art seems to be something that has to be learned and practiced regularly to be good at.  There seem to be other art styles that are just inherit to people.

***
Of course, I could be wrong too!  I'm more of a designer than anything as well
***

[Cuervo77]

Well, my 2 cents as an artist is that it really isn't more difficult to create a 16x16 or a 128x128. Yes, you have a bit more space to put in more detail, but I personally prefer starting with a larger resolution and scaling down to the proper size. Starting larger and scaling back down often gives you a look of more detail than you can get by starting from the size you are wanting to begin with. The amount of space, 32 0r 64 times larger, doesn't mean 32 or 64 times the amount of work. The main difference in work load is in what you are making. Cartoony/line graphics are certainly the easiest and shouldn't create as large a difference in time for creation. More realistic or stylized graphics can take a bit more time. That all depends on the style you are going for and the speed of the artist you are working with. For an example of what I'm talking about, the links are videos of "Dysnomia", a top down shooting game that I'm currently creating the art and animation for. The tiles are 64x64. We were heading towards the more detailed tiles, so it is taking a bit longer. Here also is what the original size of the main character started out as. Hope it shows up...lol.   The final size that is shown in the game is about half that size.









Don't judge them too harshly, the video's are more our way to show the progress of the code since we are working on this game in completely different areas of the world...lol. But the final game will use all of the tiles in there.