For me Pixelation always was a about the craft and the art, not about politics.
For me it always was irrelevant which politic believes someone held and it also never interfered with what I was interested in - the craft of the art and the preservation of knowledge. Also the safety for freelance artists and the business practices and games.
All I did I here as mod during the last 4 years I did in order to keep the knowledge as complete and accessible as possible for every member of the community (this includes members of every nation, skincolor and every background).
I can‘t tolerate to discuss with someone who aims a loaded cannon at me, with a very different view on how politicized Pixelation is. And the outcome is in every case, even the best one, an annihilation of parts of the collected community knowledge and the remnants of the comm.
I am someone who thinks that knowledge, craft and interest in arts actually is more important than a personal standpoint of a very ideas and perspectives. If I am getting forced to take a side, I will stand atill and say: for me the only thing of importance has been the craft, is the craft and I don't think that will change.
Now Pixelation has changed hands, but no information on it is available for me, I was poorly informed and Crow told me that chats are going on to which I wasn‘t invited either.
At this point it feels like I am left out.
The work I did for the comm feels also granted by the individuals who left this place long time ago stopped posting. They also haven‘t and didn't want to be in touch with the last parts of the active community here.
Now after stepping back in action, to put politics over crafts and just see only two sides – "their own" and "the enemy".
I neither can overlook the way this happened nor what the points of interest of the main discussions were.
My personal points of interest and Pixelation‘s obviously don‘t align anymore
That‘s why I step back and lay down my work as mod.
A few people recently asked to post these things here, that happens right now (I am not sure I I will keep it active though, so stand as of now is 01.07.2018)
Before you jump into the action: -Please check out the links, there are comments, answers, credits, further links etc. (Would take too much time to rewrite all of that here) -Some of the old stuff - 2013 and earlier probably isn't really accurate in it's terminology (especially the topdown "perspective" construction should rather be topdown projection) -The red haired teacher which appaears since 2018 is named Creya, probably you know her.
What is a Pixel Artist? First of all If you are looking for a pixel artist, you are not looking for any type of artist. There are illustrators, who paint beautiful pictures and then there are concept artists who come up with amazing ideas and comic-artists who draw stories and animators who make stuff move. All of those however act only on canvas
Pixel artists mainly classify as game artists though, which means that they need to know how to draw stuff and they need to know how games work. And unlike painting "pretty pictures" on canvas, games come with their fair share of limitations of the art side of things. You just can't plug something which is beautifully drawn in a game and expect it to work within the gameplay, but beautiful pixel art drawing skills are of course the thing which sticks out the most. However all the art produced for a game needs to fit together and work together and there is a whole bunch of different skills needed to make games work.
Common skills you are specifically and nearly exclusively looking for in pixel artists are: -translating drawn concepts and sketches into working pixelart -2D frame per frame animation (characters, environment and effects) with pixelart -tileset creation -background parallax painting -icon creation -pixel art fonts and logos
Can any Artist Create Pixelart? Pretty much yes, all they need to do is to sit down and look up how pixel art works, but that being said a pure portrait artist would not have much experience with the specific game-related skills, even if it's an experienced artist. So he would have to start in a few areas pretty much from scratch and a pixel artist who does his work for years most likely already has made crucial experiences regarding game related skills. Just don't expect that someone who never did game-art will perform as well at it as someone with a ton of experience.
I am a Gamedev/Artist... Here again this depends what kind of gamedev are you. Are you a professional with a signed-up business, or are you an aspiring gamedev who just started out with an engine and looks for an artist to team up with?
Usually artists and devs come in 2 kind of types - hobbyists and professionals. And unlike the popular opinion the produced quality of work doesn't play in at all all.
it simply means this:
Hobbyist?.... If you are a hobbyist you are someone who has a day-job which pays for taxes and you maybe do some work as "hobby" on the side to get some additional bucks, or you are working on your own project. Maybe your hobby one day will turn into a profitable business. Depending on the laws of your country you may earn a certain amount tax free. You should definitely talk to a tax consultant once you start getting/taking job offers to be sure that your income is law-conform.
What is a "Professional" Professionals are people who do something as their job. If you are working as waiter and the restaurant you are employed at is paying your taxes (or paying for your taxes), you are a professional waiter. Usually if you are a freelancer you have to sign-up a company (note: depends also on the country) The big differences here come with the costs of health insurance, taxes, vacation and ill-days, but more on that later.
If you are a professional you are also running your own business, you have to do your own bookkeeping, your own contracts etc. Nobody will pay you for answering initial e-mails, those rates and dead-time between projects usually is included in the rate.
Regarding Copyright Whether you are a dev and artist, also put some serious consideration into copyright law. If you intend to become a professional, talk to a lawyer specialized into this topic to get familiar with all the little details for your coutnry. If you are a hobbyist, at least make sure that you get a declaration of the artist you commissioned that you may use the work produced in your product.
Pixel Art Rates
Since game art is mostly project based, the freelance rates compared to other graphical jobs can be a bit lower, however, since jobs can go on easily for hundreds of hours, the risk is smaller than like e.g. for web design (where 150-200$/h was around 2012 quite common). On the other hand being a pixel-artist often includes gamedesign skill or knowledge of how programming works, which also cassifies it more as a technical job, than many other art jobs.
Generally speaking professionally you always pay higher rates for little jobs, and smaller rates for bigger, longer ongoing contracts, because you can give the freelancer securities and keep the dead-time ibetween jobs the artists usually would have to deal with shorter.
executive field / Europe/US:
some values for other jobs: craftsmen (plumbers, electricians, painters) 30-150$ per hour graphicians 10-250$ an hour coders can range from 10-250$ an hour doctors and lawyers can cost about 200$ an hour, sometimes a lot more
those are broken down hourly rates you can expect for game artists:
hobby-sector - freelance unprofessional field, which can work out for single commissions, but regarding the income tax laws not for bigger projects. 0-15$/h working for free, first gig, deviantart offers (unprofessional field) 15-20$/h beginners, art students without technical knowledge 20-35$/h experienced hobbyists
professional-sector - freelance 30-60% of that will be costs for taxes, health insurance, etc. 10-25$/h young, talented artists (artschool only, freshmans who are motivated but don't know yet exactly what they do) 25-50$/h junior artists, freelance (school experience, not much real world / industry experience, no to a few small completed projects) 50-100$/h senior artists, freelance (they have been through several projects and know what they do, usually many completed and released projects in their resume) more: world's top class, freelance (open end, usually those artists make their own prices, have some kind of publicity, are known etc. - by hiring them you also hire advertisment and contacts, which also pays off differently than money)
game-project oriented art direction/art asset planning 40-250$/h (huge responsibility, one wrong decision in the art design process can lead to multiple thousand of dollars budget changes for a whole game project - usually you hire those guys to safe multiple thousands of dollars of wrong investment in a project down the road)
You can expect a 65$/h rate for a project-sized job which includes a week or longer of work, single hours or less work usually is more expensive, which means the rate goes up.
Note that the rate in the link is not for freelance work, but rather from a company employment perspective. Art direction rates USA: http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes271011.htm
Why Are There Massive Differences in Prices Which You Can Expect to Pay?
-quality/time (experienced artists produce better quality much faster than beginners, beginners will most likely need much more time and the result will be much worse in terms of quality than what an experienced artists produces in the matter of minutes) If you pay artists hourly, maybe you even pay more for an inexperienced artist, than for a seasoned professional, despite they charge multiple times of the rate, but require less time and less edits.
-experienced artists will have established workflows which leads to less revisions, or better control over the end-product.
-some experienced artists even can emulate given style directions, because they are perfectly able to control what they make.
If you start out with inexperienced artists they easily could get overwhelmed by something you decided because the actual amount of work is in no relation to the amount of work they thought it would be. If that happens during the project you possibly will have to look for another artist who can complete the half finished art in the style. The completion of your project could be at stake in the worst case. Or you maybe have to start over from scratch with a new artist and with his own style and you put in money in the art produced only to find yourself at a point where you have to put more money in to get the produced stuff to level that you still can use it with a new artist.
If you don't get your parameter decisions right your game project could get quickly impossible to craft and costs can sky rocket. A lot will then depend if you find artists willing to complete the project for the price / style you offer. The more experienced an artist is and depending through how many projects they have been, the better they can answer your questions about how much work the whole project might be. That being said like game-development art sometimes is nearly impossible to quantify beforehand.
In most cases it really pays off in the long run to hire an experienced artist, who knows exactly what he is doing, which means you are paying seemingly more money, but once you start quantifying your costs for edits and little changes, in most cases the cheaper artist in the end is the more expensive option down the line, or at least the one which also includes significantly more risks.
A Short Note on General Working Times and Compensation:
Note € / US$ is about a 1:1 conversion rate - over the last years € was a bit higher than the US$, so you could say 100US$ roughly equal 85€
Employed people/Hobbyists: if you are employed in a company (Austria) you get a christmas bonus and a vacation bonus (usually 13th and 14th monthly compensation) you have 5 weeks of vacation a year you should calculate 2 weeks of being ill per year you additionally should calculate 3 weeks of public holidays per year
this means here I'd calculate with realistic 42 working weeks per year those with an avg. of 40 hours: 1680 hours of work per year
For employees the average monthly compensation here with taxes around 1400€/month for 140h of work (this includes christmas and vacation bonus) - the average hourly rate is therefore 10€/hour net (taxes deducted) or 15€/hour gross (what you could consider as freelancers)
this rate also is the average of all people, this means it includes all kind of assistance work. But this explains the 35US$ you would pay for experienced hobbyists.
Professionals/Freelancers: Of the working time above you should furthermore subtract time to do your bookkeeping and writing invoices (2 weeks per year) and you will effectively have some dead-time if you are a freelancer, where you are just looking for jobs, answering mails or chatting with clients, you will have to write contracts that the work plays out and you maybe will run into some legal trouble with some clients (let's say another 8 weeks per year just for that) which reduces the working hours for another 10 weeks (400h) which means you can effectively only work 1280h / year.
the costs for self employed people are also higher in Austria (you would have to check the pecifics for your own country) - but generally you can say health insurance will be around 15% of and taxes will be around 30% of your yearly income - so 45% of the time you work will only be for necessary expenses.
to get to the average of 1400€ after taxes, you need to earn 2550€ gross a month as a freelance
you have 107 hours a month to work effectively (1280/12). 2550/107 = 23€/h (~27US$/h) also note that this is the amount you would have to pay for the complete average of people.
which explains those values: 10-25$/h young, talented artists 25-50$/h junior artists 50$/h-100$/h senior artists
All that being said, Austria and the US are differing in details, but the gist of it: If you are living there cand can't make something close to 3000US$/month don't consider becoming a professional. (of course the country/state you live in plays into it to a fairly big amount too)
First compare your work made by other professionals. Just gether sources from different places, but make sure that the work was made by people owning their own business.
Basically: a) how much do you need to make a living (with all costs included) b) how much hours do you want to work calculate hourly rate (and look if you are in your range)
do you get enough jobs? does anyone pay your hourly rate?
if yes, great if not, maybe you aren't working enough hours, your quality is to low compared to your concurrence, you lack something, you are working to slow... so maybe consider to stay a hobbyist to support yourself.
Some big old SNES games you love, (namely the Square and Nintendo titles, which really made a buzz back in the day and are still popular today) sometimes had budgets up to 500 000 US$ + marketing costs
Modern gamedev of course provides already existing engines, but the costs for taxes and assets which have to be crafted from scratch stayed nearly the same, so these values are still valid to an extend. These costs don't include marketing costs which come on top of it. These costs do include taxes (you can calculate roughly 20-30% for taxes)
Rule of Thumb For a quick rule of thumb project cost calculation do the following: ry to find out the development costs for a game (excluding marketing costs)
of course if you have a story focused rpg the storywriting will take proportionally more. But gamedesign usually takes the lion-share of work, while art and programming are equally the same for most projects (unless you are making an ascii game or whatever) Just try to figure out the proportions of work - it's usually better to do a quick pre calculation, before you are doing nothing at all like it.
How to Calculate Animation Costs:
Generally animation work does cost a lot because it's a lot of work. Most people who never animated on a frame-pre frame basis won't gras t. I this case just try to find animation livestreams or watch youtube timelapses to get a bit of an understanding.
The biggest variables you have to consider are: design spritestyle spritesize fluidity reusability and polish level
Design design is an amount of the job where pixel-specific considerations don't really play in. You will always need a specific time to design something or create concept art, or how something should look. I mean some generic things like slimes or cats or whatever don't really need a lot of time to "design". But once you get in the realm of interesting concepts which require creativity to pull off. Which is a valid amount of work necessary before even starting with animating.
e.g. Shovel Knight has tons of super interesting knight designs which certainly just "didn't happen" but had serious thoughts behind it, before they even drew the first frame of their animation.
Don't overlook that the first frame of a sprite can therefore take a lot longer, than just "animating" a given design.
Spritesize spritesize most likely is a decision to make which will greatly affect the time needed to complete an animation
just look at the physics: a 8x8 pixel sprite has 64 pixels to edit a 16x16 sprite has 256 pixels to edit a 32x32 sprite has 1024 pixels to edit a 64x64 sprite has 4096 pixels to edit and so forth.
it's increasing exponentially, which means the amount of work logically would increase too. Just because of how pixelart works as a medium, something with exactly the same style will take longer to polish if it's bigger, because you have to go in and every pixel for every line etc. Of course some styles aren't possible at smaller spritesizes, bc. you simply lack the pixels/space/resolution to get the point across.
Spritestyle (amount of shading, amount of details, outlines,) this is a big one.
Generally you can say the more cartoony and simple something looks the easier it is to animate, and the more realistic it will look the harder it will be to animate. The biggest difference here is amount of details and shading. The more details you have the longer it takes to draw all of them in The more shading steps you use, the longer it will take to draw them in and it generally also takes time to make that stuff work in an animation quickly said outlines can add additional work to animations as well, because in pixel art you have to polish them up. But if and how to use outlines or not is a super deep topic on it's own.
Fluidity fluidity is another big one. The more frames you have the longer it will take to draw them. "RPG-Maker" 3-Frame animations aren't real animations - basically just keyframes, 24 images per second disney movie like animation are real animations anything inbetween can be an economical decision. e.g. look at this 8 / 16 frame comparison:
and it's super hard to get the optimum of quality if you just later increase the amount of frames and don't plan it with a good framerate beforehand:
because you will loose out on weight and timing. That being said the example here is generally on a high level of quality, but if you start with 2 frame walks, increase them then to 4 frames and maybe later to 8 this last step generally will look much worse than just starting to plan it out with 8 frames.
here again you limit the artist with to few frames, so that he has cut down on getting animations in and if you choose to high amounts of animation frames, you will end up with an obscene amount of work. If you don't get it right from the beginning your quality will suffer.
Reusabilty:
sometimes parts of animations or sprites can get reused to craft other frames. This can have a significant effect on the time per frame, but can't really can get calculated in from the get go. Generally good animators have an established workflow to reuse frames or parts of them, but it's hard to get behind the design of this, without not being able to animate yourself.
Polish level Sketches are fast Polishing up final artwork to high levels of craftmanship costs additional time. unpolished pixelart generally will look cheaper than polished one. most company work is polished to high levels.
e.g.:
but it's completely up to you if you rather want to cut down on polish or on the more substantial decisions which safe crafting time.
Conclusions:
if you don't know anything about animation hire a professional who can tell you project experience values, this might cost a bit, but will save you money in the long run.
You can get animations for a few bucks and animations for thousands of $. A super simple 4x4 graphics game can't get compared to metal slug animation quality. And artists also vary differ in prices and experience.
So there is no straight answer to "how much does animation cost" Generally if something which is animated looks professional and expensive it most likely was even more time intensive to craft than you imagine if you never did animate anything. And therefore it also most likely did cost a lot more than laymen expect.
Generally speaking big companies also have big project budgets, so you shouldn't expect to get the same quality level without paying a similar amount. Read the section about game projects above, if you are unsure. If your project budget is small or you are inexperienced with commissioning, rather do something simple, smart and effective to gather a few experiences.
This is currently the end of the guide. I hope you learned a thing or 2 and you are now much better prepared for gamedev stuff.
I decided to start this thread that we have a place to show off some awesome pixel art featured in released games throughout the years. Since games are limited by production restrictions and not all assets tend to look equally good, I want to have a place where we can just share some of our favorite bits.
If you post here, please upload the images via an imagehoster and don't crosslink directly out of the web. I personally use my abload.de account, bc. those images most likely won't vanish for a long time.
Gameart is fairly different than lllustrations, because those artworks are made with a ton of restrictions. Maybe they are forced in a "playable" perspective, are made out of repeating tiles, or in case of portraits they are limited by lighting or angles - nonetheless there is game-artwork around which are great, or you have a personal attachment to. Maybe you simply liked the game, or just the feeling of a particular area of the game. Just share the stuff you really like
Rules: -art posted should be pixel art, or close to pixel art (slight 3D in the background of screenshots, soft light gradients etc. don't matter, but if you really want to show off some HD2D art or other references, please but them in SPOILERS
-Images posted should be sharp pixel art preferably gifs and pngs without artifacts. JPGs are kinda ok too post, but if you do so please state that you haven't found a sharp image
-Images posted should have been featured in released games! (single Mockups and Proof-of-Concept artpieces not featured in game shouldn't get posted)
-please state the game, the platform and the release year, so that everybody knows what game the art is from. It also would be cool if you could name the area, or the character name.
-you may share why you think a certain piece of artwork is great, and maybe post reference material or stories. Since art is influenced by taste, try giving others a glimpse of what you appreciate- this could make the thread much more interesting.
In order to kick this off I posted a few images and tried to come up with a template for how I imagine this thread should continue:
Game: Sword of Mana (action RPG) Release Year: 2003 Platform: Gameboy Advance
Cascade Caves Bossroom:
What I always particularly liked about this place just were the colors. In this particular room the game changed from it's topdown view into something more reminiscent of old arcade sidescrollers, with much bigger setpieces and a lot more depth to it and I think it's just looking breathtaking.
Game: Castlevania Symphony of the Night (action adventure) Release Year: 1997 Platform: Playstation
Catacomb Cells
Most likely my favorite area in the whole game, probably because it's painting-wise on a completely different level than 90% of the other areals. I just love the subtle color changes in it, the attention to values and the texturing. The whole setting and setup also heavily reminded me of a of chapter 53 of Berserk.
Game: Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones (Turn-Based Strategy) Release Year: 2004 Platform: Gameboy Advance
Cyclops Critical attack
For this one I personally liked the menacing design of this opponent (he is about 2-3 times as big as your normal units), and the whole anatomy and weight to the animation. I never have been a huge fan of his weapon, but I think the character sprite an animation are just perfect.
This years Gamescom is approaching and I wanted to ask if someone out of our community is attending it - especially considering that we have quite a few people in our community from Germany and it's surrounding countries.
Finally I got an example for this effect, really wanted to bring up this for a really long time.
I believe that there is a spot for every style in pixel art, where your chosen resolution for a certain look is just really efficient to work with.
One of the first thing you will recognize if you start doing pixel art, is that the bigger you make your artwork, the more time it usually takes to polish up things like jaggy edges with handplaced antialias. Another common thing is that the bigger the artwork gets, the more colors you can put in it (just from the grid) and therefore you have more values to create form with – but usually this also takes more time. The bigger an artwork gets the more color we tend to use and the smoother the „gradients/bands“ look.
Speak the higher the quality appears.
But aside from this there is another thing, where even smaller resolution graphic could take longer to create depending on the style, because you have to fiddle around with every detail to get an somewhat satisfying looking result.
Now specifically to my example:
In this case the portrait on the left which is 48x48 completely broke apart and would be much more work than the 64x64 portrait next to it, because it uses too many colors for it's resolutio to be visually „crisp and clean“ and the stylization is to slight for the small resolution. The angle of the eyes doesn't align well and there are plenty of readability issues.
One thing one always has specifically have to consider with pixel art is to what degree certain features need to get stylized to convey them effectively with pixels.
This brought me to 2 very general basic observations: The more slighter angles you want to portray in a clean way, the higher your resolution has to be. The more stylized the art is, the smaller you can go.
If you make a stylization you should always ask yourself if it works well for the size you chose and you can portray all details effectively in your style (you always stylize in pixelart, consciously or not).
But The problem can not only happen with making stuff to small, but also with a really simple style which gets too big for pixelart. Therefore this would need a ton of work on smoothing lines with AA - which is quite inefficient to do with pixel art and therefore should be avoided.
I think the way to go about this before you start with any pixelart is that you should think about this basic relationship: amount of color per ramp / resolution used
If you have a ramp of 5 colors, but only 4 pixels space, your ramp simply has too many colors and the image will break if you want to use all of them. Although if you think about how big your average cluster should be for the amount of colors you want to use use and design our ramp according to that you will get overall much more cohesive and thought through results. Of course personal bias will always play into it a fair bit.