I am in the process of putting together my art requirements doc for my first computer game. I'm going to contract out the work, which is why I am here. Before I put the full document up and solicit artists I'd like to get some advice from you on roughly how long my art requirements would likely take to be produced (and thus how much I should be budgeting). I understand this will be a stab-in-the-dark but it will be better than the position of almost total ignorance that I am in now.
All art would be either 32x32-48pixel tiles for map building or 32-48x32-48 blocks for character animation.
This would be for a top-down perspective game with a Legand-of-Zelda/Children of Mana-ish viewpoint. The game would be strongly grid based with orthogonal, tile-by-tile movement so there is a definite need for the main character to be clearly seen whilst standing at the 'centre' point of a tile.
My rough requirements would be:
1 main character (a cartoon penguin) with 4 directional movement, nothing fancier than a 3 frame walk/idle animation + another few sets of 4 frame movement animations (belly slide, standing up, diving to floor, victory, defeat)
5 collectable pickups that need minimal animation, just enough to make them stand-out from the background (I suppose good composition might even render the need for animation moot).
Then there's the background tiles which is the meat of the work:
- 16 different distinct tile types, most of which need north/south/east/west version which results in about
- 44 different tiles, some of which require 4 frame animations which would add up to a total of
- 96 different assets, and then some of those need 3 further pallet switched versions (which I'm assuming would be almost trivially easy?) to bring the total to about
- 270 distinct assets (although as you can see there will be a lot of similarity between those tiles).
Asking for the pallet swapped version of the tiles is a bit of a luxury but I feel paying the extra for the professional eye for colour is worth it.
The work would be structured in paid milestones, starting with an unanimated main character and some of the base, most important tiles to make sure the artist and myself are in synch style wise with the option for me (or the artist) to stop if it isn't working for us.
As I said, I'm fairly clueless about how much time that would take a competent ($30 p/h?) artist so any advice would be greatly appreciated.