Hey Reddit!
I'm the lead engine programmer and part of a small dev team currently developing a mobile game in English and Japanese. Our team currently consists of a few people that work on this on our spare time. We are already working with some music producers on our soundtrack. We bug our friends but a lot of them are as busy as we are.
We have all held professional jobs in either gaming, art/illustration, programming, and writing, and most of us have degrees in one of these areas.
As anyone knows building a relatively complex game requires a lot of time and energy, and creativity. None of us currently work for game studios and don't want to. Big studios are usually pretty exploitative, and we think the glut of indie games is going to eat a lot of other profits eventually anyway. Games are art, and art is fun to make, but sadly the economic value of it is sometimes hard to capture.
But! We have a good budget already allocated, and we are also raising a bit more over the next year or two to make this a reality and accelerate our development process.
We'd like to own copyright to the commissions for commercial use, but we actually don't plan on selling the game for any profit at this time. We just want to make some art and sustain the project after release with a Patreon-type model for expansion. It is not meant to replace our day jobs or supplement us with money. This game is our side project. We are doing it because we love it. Note we also don't want to silence artists. If we use your assets in our game, we are going to credit you for your work.
We're looking for some specific help and are capable of giving relatively accurate direction. Budget for things is somewhat dependent upon the work being done, and what your rates/previous experience are. We're not fixed on any of this.
On Game Assets Our game engine will re-render everything to 1080p, so large raster assets (3840x2160) will be fine. Background art needs to be 16:9 AR. We'd prefer a fully digital workflow.
Concept Sketches We'd like to be able to commission some concept artists to help us take pieces of our world and create atmosphere. We're not looking for complex art here - more storyboard-esque sketches. These sketches are exceptionally free; we aren't looking to really nail down any style, but rather get a sampling of one-or-two-off sketches from various artists on their interpretations of what we have created. Sometimes you get too in your own head about what something looks like or how it works, and then you miss out on great ideas. We're not willing to pay a whole lot for these, but we aren't expecting quality, either. Line art/basic B&W shading is fine. Do it on some paper and take a photo of it for all we care. We'd just like to share our world, and have people transform it in their own heads. Say $15 ea. Don't spend more than an hour on it.
This one is out of my own pocket and not the overall game budget. I'd like to give a couple of paragraphs or even questions from our dev/story notebooks, and then commission about ten of these from radically different artists within the next few weeks for a month-ish deadline.
Actual Assets
I'd point you toward 5pb x Nitroplus's Chaos;Head for a lot of our overall visual style. Note the difference in style between semi-realistic backgrounds and flat characters, see some of the screenshots from VNDB. If you don't have experience in a similar style, please don't add yourself to the ring for developing actual assets.
Background Artists We need 2D background artists skilled in developing semirealistic anime/manga style backgrounds. Previous VN or Manga commission experience would be preferred. Going rate for a lot of these from various artists we have seen with previous work with indie VN studios range wildly from $100-300, usually depending upon the geographic location of the artist.
Character Artists We need anime/manga character artists that are capable of good, relatively flat CEL-style shading and clean linework. VN characters are often really crisp and flat over detailed backgrounds. You will need to be able to produce an original character in full-body, from a few angles, as well as a series of emotions for those characters as the game progresses.
It's really hard to say what we would pay here as a flat rate because I think in doing so it limits the relationship. We'd prefer to negotiate a rate for specific pieces from character artists. For example, work with an artist at a flat rate of a few hundred on some character design sketches, then the final character design, then on each emotion as we decide what we need in the story at each point. I think it makes sense to negotiate a flat rate for design with n revisions, with any additional being charged for the artists. The quotes I have received from some artists already are so wildly all over the place that I don't know what quite to budget, but it seems that you can get some acceptable work for $65-100 for an initial design from a spec, single shaded full-body after some line art crit and revision. We have 6 characters we will end up needing illustrated at this stage of story development.
We will probably only choose 1-2 character artists and then work with them indefinitely.
Payment and Deadlines Also, we have deadlines measured in months. Nobody is pressuring us to make this thing. Nobody's job relies on it. Depending upon deadlines, and to protect ourselves, we'll use PayPal to pay a down payment and then pay upon completion. We can pay in USD or JPY.
Also, if you're interested in working on the project in the future just for the fun of it, we'd certainly be interested in talking to you. Eventually we'd like to get a larger team of people together that just like working creatively together to continue to make similar things in the future.
Submitted October 07, 2018 at 01:10AM by team-nerva https://ift.tt/2OL6GmY
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