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.
> For submissions which are grouped together into one larger one, are Favorites assigned to the original submitter or to the aggregating user?
If submissions are grouped together into a larger one, then the owner will be the same.
> Likewise, if there are any Favorites, comments, etc. on the individual submissions, do they stick around or are the Favorites/comments lost to the ether?
Comments will probably have to be combined, which could be messy. Favorites will have to be aggregated. Basically, if someone marked one of the submissions as a favorite, then the new one is automatically marked as a favorite for them. Unfortunately, if someone marked two or more, it's still only one favorite per user. However, popularity points are added when favorites are added originally, so those won't be revoked.
For the "Recently Submitted Art", I was thinking we could possibly organize it as most "Recent Submitter" or author, whichever you'd prefer more (From Your Idea). Then after clicking on that user, a window would scroll down and list the artwork posted by that person within in the last week (or whatever timeline would fit best now that its organized this way). Although people who post a lot will be near the front, it will be easy to skip over these people and view authors you tend to like (viewing all their recent art).
My worry here is that this may end up being kind of counterintuitive, if you click on an art submission and are instead taken to a page with multiple art submissions rather than the submission itself. I'm not sure how I'd do this in a way that would be intuitive to users and not take up extra space. I'm open to suggestions.
Another idea would be to have a "Subscribe to User" button. This way you could split the "Recent Submitter" into two rows. Only the users you're subscribed to would show up on the 1st row while the 2nd row would list everyone else.
This is awesome. We have a mostly unused "friend" system, so we could just harness that and have a "new art by my friends" block on the home page. The potential drawback here is that a new block (or a new row of images) would bump the latest blog post below the fold for most people. While I don't update the blog frequently enough, sometimes it's important enough that everyone see it without scrolling. This is compelling enough that I'll try to come up with a way to fit it in, though.
Note: This competition actually ended on the 4th, but due to a glitch with voting, I had to change the end date to the 12th to allow the voting phase. No submissions were made during that time.
This thread is now locked. Any thread on this topic (either specifically or in general) made between now and when I can make a formal statement on this (in a few hours) will be deleted.
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.
Scrollbars, you say?
(These are CC0, feel free to add them to this submission is you want.)
> For submissions which are grouped together into one larger one, are Favorites assigned to the original submitter or to the aggregating user?
If submissions are grouped together into a larger one, then the owner will be the same.
> Likewise, if there are any Favorites, comments, etc. on the individual submissions, do they stick around or are the Favorites/comments lost to the ether?
Comments will probably have to be combined, which could be messy. Favorites will have to be aggregated. Basically, if someone marked one of the submissions as a favorite, then the new one is automatically marked as a favorite for them. Unfortunately, if someone marked two or more, it's still only one favorite per user. However, popularity points are added when favorites are added originally, so those won't be revoked.
Thanks for the feedback! :)
For the "Recently Submitted Art", I was thinking we could possibly organize it as most "Recent Submitter" or author, whichever you'd prefer more (From Your Idea). Then after clicking on that user, a window would scroll down and list the artwork posted by that person within in the last week (or whatever timeline would fit best now that its organized this way). Although people who post a lot will be near the front, it will be easy to skip over these people and view authors you tend to like (viewing all their recent art).
My worry here is that this may end up being kind of counterintuitive, if you click on an art submission and are instead taken to a page with multiple art submissions rather than the submission itself. I'm not sure how I'd do this in a way that would be intuitive to users and not take up extra space. I'm open to suggestions.
Another idea would be to have a "Subscribe to User" button. This way you could split the "Recent Submitter" into two rows. Only the users you're subscribed to would show up on the 1st row while the 2nd row would list everyone else.
This is awesome. We have a mostly unused "friend" system, so we could just harness that and have a "new art by my friends" block on the home page. The potential drawback here is that a new block (or a new row of images) would bump the latest blog post below the fold for most people. While I don't update the blog frequently enough, sometimes it's important enough that everyone see it without scrolling. This is compelling enough that I'll try to come up with a way to fit it in, though.
Note: This competition actually ended on the 4th, but due to a glitch with voting, I had to change the end date to the 12th to allow the voting phase. No submissions were made during that time.
If you have posted in this thread, please see OGA's official statement in this post:
http://opengameart.org/forumtopic/admin-official-statement-on-grouping-a...
This thread will remain locked. You may discuss this further in the new thread, although this specific incident is over and done with.
Bart
This thread is now locked. Any thread on this topic (either specifically or in general) made between now and when I can make a formal statement on this (in a few hours) will be deleted.
Pages