How many different tile types do you have, out of curiosity?
If you decide to go without transitions, there are still some cool things you can do to make your tiles look nice, like going with a slightly more abstract look and giving each tile a defined edge. I'm not sure if that makes sense, so take a look at these sets by Buch and Surt and maybe you'll see what I mean:
Most or all of them are licensed CC-BY, which is well suited to commercial use if you decide to sell your game, as it has no share-alike requirement. I'm not sure about the speciifcs of your requirements, but if you can use these assets (and bear in mind, you can modify them, or pay someone else to modify them, which is a huge shortcut and would cut a lot of cost).
If you're willing to make some concessions here and there (weapon animations, tile transitions, etc), you might be able to keep your total costs under $100 if you use OGA's existing sprite art, and at that point it's no longer really much of financial risk.
Then, once you start making some sales, you can use that revenue to make graphical improvements and release those in later versions of the game.
I think the biggest problem is new art being pushed out from the front page, if someone submits several items in a short time. Ideally this could be improved, independent of how art is actually categorised. So I would add my agreement to the comments about expanding the amount of latest art shown on the front page. I've always thought it odd that, for a site dedicated to art, the front page gives only a tiny amount of space to the Latest Art - only the latest 4 contributions are shown, which seems ridiculously small!
We used to have 3 rows of latest art. The weekly favorites box was put there due to this exact problem (namely, popular art being pushed off of the front page by a large number of submissions). Going back to how it was will make things worse.
Meanwhile, more space and more entries are shown for things like forum topics, comments, and art collections (don't get me wrong, those things are useful, but they are surely less important than the art itself).
Depends on what you mean by "less important". The way to get people to stay here is to draw them into the community, and the best way to do that is to feature things like the forum in a spot above the fold on the front page. As for art collections, we've had a lot of people ask to see consistent sets of art, so those are on the front page to help people find them. I don't anticipate removing the forum box or the collections box from the front page.
3 rows would give 12 or the most recent entries, and yet more older entries could be listed as text links only down the side, similar to the recent comments. I also note that a large amount of space is given to the blog. I realise the admins would want to give prominence to the blog :) But at the same time, this is only occasionally updated, with an entry from May still showing on the front page.
I'm hoping that I'll be in a position to update it more frequently later (like, several times a week).
Blog entries from May, but only 4 of the most recent art uploads - that balance just seems wrong to me. Perhaps limit to the last couple of blog entries, and give a lot more space for latest art? Whilst redesigning a front page may not be straightforward, it is surely easier than more complex feature requests being considered?
IMO the important thing here is to make sure the latest blog entry is "above the fold" (that is, visible without scrolling down). I'm not against, say, reducing the blog to the latest couple of entrires and then putting more rows of recent art below it.
The idea to only show one submission from an artist on the front page if they submit several seems reasonable too, though I agree with cemkalyoncu and para about possible confusion - I might think that only 1 new item has been uploaded since last time I looked, but not realise there's another hidden entry, so ideally this should be optional. (And certainly for the separate page http://opengameart.org/latest it should be off, or optional, as users looking there surely want to see it all, not just one per author.)
I'm not sure I'm going to do this at all, honestly. I don't know how I would do it without it either being cumbersome or confusing, so for the meantime I'm going to set this particular idea aside (particularly since it would be alleviated somewhat if I could squeeze more art onto the front page).
For the debate about grouping multiple entries, I feel this should be done where there is a commonality in the art, not simply that it's by the same author. Otherwise it makes searching harder - if I'm searching for "goblin", I don't mind if 100 goblins appear (that's what I'm searching for), but it is harder if I get an entry of 100 unrelated icons, and then have to search through that to see what the "goblin" is in that entry.
Don't worry. I'm not going to go grouping things together willy-nilly.
On that note, perhaps one feature that might be useful is more specific tagging - e.g., per file rather than per entry? I don't know how feasible that is though.
Probably not feasible. :(
A thought experiment: one person uploads 5 separate items at once, whilst another person does it over a long time. There must be plenty of artists here who have loads of different art entries, including those that may be related. Are the latter a problem too, or is it only a problem due to the "Latest Art" issue? If they aren't a problem, then it seems odd to say that one group should be collected together, and the other group shouldn't, for all time - surely a better solution is to resolve the Latest Art issue.
Well, I wouldn't say that anyone uploading art is ever a "problem", per se. :)
That said, let's say someone makes a bunch of small submissions that would be better off grouped together. If they're all submitted at once, that's more of an issue than if they're submitted slowly over a longer period of time, since what always brings this up (and this is, if I recall, the third time we've had issues about this) is art being knocked off the front page. However, in the grand scheme of things, some of the stuff in the archive would be better off grouped togther as well.
In all honesty, there is no way to completely solve the issue of large batches of submissions knocking art off of the front page. As I said above, back when the top two rows weren't occupied by the week's favorites, the problem was far worse, even though the latest art section was three times as big. Even if I put five more rows of art there, it will still happen occasionally, although hopefully the situation can be improved somewhat.
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.
How many different tile types do you have, out of curiosity?
If you decide to go without transitions, there are still some cool things you can do to make your tiles look nice, like going with a slightly more abstract look and giving each tile a defined edge. I'm not sure if that makes sense, so take a look at these sets by Buch and Surt and maybe you'll see what I mean:
Notice how they completely avoid the need for transitions by making the blocky look part of the art style.
You might also want to look at these items here, particularly the characters:
http://opengameart.org/content/oga-16x16-jrpg-sprites-tiles
Most or all of them are licensed CC-BY, which is well suited to commercial use if you decide to sell your game, as it has no share-alike requirement. I'm not sure about the speciifcs of your requirements, but if you can use these assets (and bear in mind, you can modify them, or pay someone else to modify them, which is a huge shortcut and would cut a lot of cost).
If you're willing to make some concessions here and there (weapon animations, tile transitions, etc), you might be able to keep your total costs under $100 if you use OGA's existing sprite art, and at that point it's no longer really much of financial risk.
Then, once you start making some sales, you can use that revenue to make graphical improvements and release those in later versions of the game.
Awesome :)
No need to type anything into the search box.
I'm not a member of the wiki, but I've read a bunch of it.
I think the biggest problem is new art being pushed out from the front page, if someone submits several items in a short time. Ideally this could be improved, independent of how art is actually categorised. So I would add my agreement to the comments about expanding the amount of latest art shown on the front page. I've always thought it odd that, for a site dedicated to art, the front page gives only a tiny amount of space to the Latest Art - only the latest 4 contributions are shown, which seems ridiculously small!
We used to have 3 rows of latest art. The weekly favorites box was put there due to this exact problem (namely, popular art being pushed off of the front page by a large number of submissions). Going back to how it was will make things worse.
Meanwhile, more space and more entries are shown for things like forum topics, comments, and art collections (don't get me wrong, those things are useful, but they are surely less important than the art itself).
Depends on what you mean by "less important". The way to get people to stay here is to draw them into the community, and the best way to do that is to feature things like the forum in a spot above the fold on the front page. As for art collections, we've had a lot of people ask to see consistent sets of art, so those are on the front page to help people find them. I don't anticipate removing the forum box or the collections box from the front page.
3 rows would give 12 or the most recent entries, and yet more older entries could be listed as text links only down the side, similar to the recent comments. I also note that a large amount of space is given to the blog. I realise the admins would want to give prominence to the blog :) But at the same time, this is only occasionally updated, with an entry from May still showing on the front page.
I'm hoping that I'll be in a position to update it more frequently later (like, several times a week).
Blog entries from May, but only 4 of the most recent art uploads - that balance just seems wrong to me. Perhaps limit to the last couple of blog entries, and give a lot more space for latest art? Whilst redesigning a front page may not be straightforward, it is surely easier than more complex feature requests being considered?
IMO the important thing here is to make sure the latest blog entry is "above the fold" (that is, visible without scrolling down). I'm not against, say, reducing the blog to the latest couple of entrires and then putting more rows of recent art below it.
The idea to only show one submission from an artist on the front page if they submit several seems reasonable too, though I agree with cemkalyoncu and para about possible confusion - I might think that only 1 new item has been uploaded since last time I looked, but not realise there's another hidden entry, so ideally this should be optional. (And certainly for the separate page http://opengameart.org/latest it should be off, or optional, as users looking there surely want to see it all, not just one per author.)
I'm not sure I'm going to do this at all, honestly. I don't know how I would do it without it either being cumbersome or confusing, so for the meantime I'm going to set this particular idea aside (particularly since it would be alleviated somewhat if I could squeeze more art onto the front page).
For the debate about grouping multiple entries, I feel this should be done where there is a commonality in the art, not simply that it's by the same author. Otherwise it makes searching harder - if I'm searching for "goblin", I don't mind if 100 goblins appear (that's what I'm searching for), but it is harder if I get an entry of 100 unrelated icons, and then have to search through that to see what the "goblin" is in that entry.
Don't worry. I'm not going to go grouping things together willy-nilly.
On that note, perhaps one feature that might be useful is more specific tagging - e.g., per file rather than per entry? I don't know how feasible that is though.
Probably not feasible. :(
A thought experiment: one person uploads 5 separate items at once, whilst another person does it over a long time. There must be plenty of artists here who have loads of different art entries, including those that may be related. Are the latter a problem too, or is it only a problem due to the "Latest Art" issue? If they aren't a problem, then it seems odd to say that one group should be collected together, and the other group shouldn't, for all time - surely a better solution is to resolve the Latest Art issue.
Well, I wouldn't say that anyone uploading art is ever a "problem", per se. :)
That said, let's say someone makes a bunch of small submissions that would be better off grouped together. If they're all submitted at once, that's more of an issue than if they're submitted slowly over a longer period of time, since what always brings this up (and this is, if I recall, the third time we've had issues about this) is art being knocked off the front page. However, in the grand scheme of things, some of the stuff in the archive would be better off grouped togther as well.
In all honesty, there is no way to completely solve the issue of large batches of submissions knocking art off of the front page. As I said above, back when the top two rows weren't occupied by the week's favorites, the problem was far worse, even though the latest art section was three times as big. Even if I put five more rows of art there, it will still happen occasionally, although hopefully the situation can be improved somewhat.
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.
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