Curious how much time certain work should take

[pallandrome]

Hi everyone! I'm what one might call an artistic philistine. I know NOTHING about art, pixilated or otherwise. Arting is not a thing I am familiar with. It's not a thing I know. With that in mind, I come to you with a question, because I figure you'll be (vastly) better equipped to answer it than I am.

If I wanted one guy to do ALL of the art in a game the size and quality of Final Fantasy Tactics, how long would it take?

Same question, but now for all of the Animation?

And for that matter, would the same guy be doing both of these for sprite work?

Thanks in advance!

[Helm]

If you know nothing about art, it will take  approximately forever.

[pallandrome]

ack! good point, hehe. I should have said "how long should this quality and quantity of art take for a professional artist?"

As in, if I were looking to hire someone, how much time should they be expected to need for the project?

[Cyangmou]

hi pallandrone

the time someone needs strongly depends how much  it is polished. FFTA (I think you are talking about advance) is for example a game which has top-notch graphics. Also the designs are very unique and there are lots of pieces, maybe things you don't even have thought of.

make first a rough list of the workload:

Icons:
-about 200 item icons
-some other icons

Menu Art:
-menu designs, map designs, map icons, menu icons
-intro art

-faces (about 55 pieces, non-ppixel art, but very well drawn and clear for their resolution)

tiles&animation

-about 60 maps (somewhat of 35 unique tilesets)
-about 15 monster sprites
-34 common chars (about 40 frames per)
-~8 unique chars (up to 80 frames, emotions ... call 'em heros)

weapon paperdolling (saves a bunch of time)

-atk&effect gfx
most of this is non-pixel art, but very detailed and with lots of frames, great effects.

As you see there is a bunch of stuff. If you start with your own game, you also have to calculate lots of time for designs and stuff which won't make it in the game, you can't build in everything.

Icons:
-about 200 item icons - at least 15min/piece = 50h
-some other icons (class icons, bubbles, craft icons, HUD icons, map icons about 100 pieces) - 20min/piece = 25h

Menu Art:
-menu design
-map designs
-misc stuff (buttons, small icons, arrows ...)
-textboxes

really hard to say, calculate somewhat of about 60h

Intro
-intro art

depends on how much you do, storyboarding the font, animations, length... and ... all other you need

-faces (about 55 pieces, non-pixel art, but very well drawn and clear for their resolution) about 4h for each (= 220h)

tiles&animation

-about 60 maps (somewhat of 35 unique tilesets) with good planning + reuse, about 20h per map, all together maybe 1000h

-about 15 monster sprites (50 frames) about 10h per piece (=150h)

-34 common chars (about 40 frames per) about 8h (270h)
-~8 unique chars (up to 80 frames, emotions ... call 'em heros) calculate 20h per hero, they need lots of personality, lots of concepts, need to be appealing... 160h

weapon paperdolling (saves a bunch of time)

-atk&effect gfx
most of this is non-pixel art, but very detailed and with lots of frames, great effects. With about 300h all is sure

50h icons
25h icons
60h menu art
xh intro
220h faces
1000h all the maps
150h monster sprites + animations
270h common chars
160h heros
300h effects

total about 2250h - very tight calculated, if you do your first calculations with about 3000h of a graphical workload It's doable.

They also had 15 artists just for drawing. If you calculate it with 15 artists, and a 40h week of work everybody would have worked 5 weeks. I don't know how long it was in development and how much of the artists worked in the core-graphic team. but if you calculate with 8 artists, you'd need about 10 weeks, which is with a development time of about a year for a gba game is relative realistic.

Another thing you have to keep in mind is that you really need some specailists to create a game in this quality, I don't think you will find anyone who is.
For a huge workload like this a coordinator and art-director is also necessary, otherwise the graphics/styles will clash, it's a huge work to coordinate the stuff.

If you find anyone who thinks he can create a game like it on his own, i'd say you have someone who is really self-confident, plain unexperienced or overestimating himself really.
If it's a top-notch project like FFTA think with a team, it's not doable with a team smaller than 5 really motivated people - and even with a small team you have far a long development time.

[pallandrome]

Yeah, I was figuring to get a project of this size done in any semblance of usable time-frame, I'd need a team working the man-hours. I saw in one of the stickied posts a projection of 50 dollars an hour for professional artists. This translates (for those following along at home) to $150k on art. This is, I'll admit, a little pricey for what I'm looking for. Not to mention if we want to get that done in a reasonable timeframe (lets say four months, and I despise crunching so we've got 40 hour work weeks) then I'd need to find seven reliable professionals looking for full-time work with experience in sprite art.

TL:DR? The scope of this project needs to be narrowed to make it financially and logistically viable. Thanks Cyangmou!

So, given that starting point, lets reframe the project.

If one were willing to accept lesser quality, say, something from the N64/Sega era, does the man-hour price tag go down? Or would you need to cut features to save the time and money, such as by removing faces and character animations and relying on text and effect animations to tell your story (I know, not ideal by any means, but simply as an example)?

EDIT: If you'd like to think of it as a challenge, how would YOU go about trying to make a 2.5d RPG on a 50 grand art budget?

[Helm]

I wouldn't, personally. Dropping the quality of art is not a good idea because these games (tactic games) appeal on relatively little, so not even getting the bits of eye-candy that are customary for the genre (some special attack animations, a coherent story with character portraits that have different emotions, for example) it would start to look very bargain bin, very fast. Of course a tactics game lives and dies on how deep and good the tactics are, but then you could just as well be making a chips-and-hex-map wargame which needs very little art. A big part of the appeal of srpgs is little fighting men walking around on uneven terrain, I guess. It seems everyone underestimates how much art goes into such a game. Is it the two-direction only iso format that makes people think 'sure... I could make this game'?


What I would suggest is trying to find a funding partner or someone to invest, not to ask your artist(s) to cut corners well beyond what would make sense to them and you aesthetically. 'Make it uglier' is not a request a lot of artists understand and for good reason. Telling them all animations need to be 2-4 frames for ex. to save time is not EXACTLY the same as 'make it uglier', but it's pretty close. Also yes, 3-5 people on a reasonable salary would be the minimum if you want to make a game with fifty little fighting men and monsters doing their all little attacks and on varied maps. How many srpgs by indie one man or two man teams have you come across?

[pallandrome]

Hah, a chips and hex wargame is sounding more and more like what I'm looking for, price-wise, honestly. As this isn't MEANT to look like a major release modern title, bargain bin graphics aren't necessarily the project killer they would be if one were trying to release a game for the 3DS, or what have you.

Though, and I'll admit this is arguing semantics a bit, finding ways to make something cheaper is not quite the same as "make it uglier". Sometimes, you have the budget that you have, and you have the project that you have, and yojavascript:void(0);u don't have another option than try to make one match the other while putting out the best product possible. Do I wish for an infinite budget? Sure, who wouldn't, straw man argument there, obviously. And if I get the 150K funding I'd need to make this a top notch project, you best bet your tooshie that I'd happily spend it on making the artwork fantastic. But part of figuring out how to put together a business plan and proposal means exploring your options depending on how much financial investment gets made. If a potential investor says "I'm unwilling to spend the 150k that you say this project requires, but I AM willing to spend 50k. Do you have an option for that?" then I need to have an answer for him. Preferrably one that ends with a project getting funded  

Hmm, that last paragraph started sounding a little preachy, but that was unintended, and I definitely appreciate all the advice. I just wanted to lay out why I was going the way I was with the line of questioning. Pitching it as a 2.5d wargame is really not a bad idea if we end up at that price level, and if I don't think of any other options, I may well go with that.

EDIT: This is all a bit off track, however. The original question remains, if you had to make a strategy RPG on a shoestring art budget, how would you try to do it? follow-up question, as I'm new to this forum, does etiquette dictate that, since we've moved on a bit from the original topic, that a new thread be started?

[blumunkee]

To answer that question, I would do something episodic like squeenix did with FFIV on WII. Either the first episode bombs and you walk away without divesting yourself of your life savings, or the game does well and you use part of the profit to release another high quality episode. Rinse lather and repeat.

[PixelPiledriver]

The original question remains, if you had to make a strategy RPG on a shoestring art budget, how would you try to do it?

From my personal experience:
It is natural for people to over scope.
No matter how much funding you have the size of a project must be controlled.
Reduce the scope of your project as much as possible.
This will allow you to polish minimal content to the maximum.
Start with something simple, complete components of the game as you go.
Allow it to grow if you have the time.
It's much less stressful and usually ends up with a better game in the end.
This is opposed to starting with a massive project, and cutting it down as you run out of time.
Fun art will get people interested in checking it out.
Good gameplay will generate a fanbase of players that share it with others and are hungry for a sequel/expansion/another game from your studio.

Minimalism can be made very appealing with polish, and can save a lot of time <-- depending on how you do it.
Frozen Synapse
Cubivore

I would do something episodic

Also a good and common way of doing things, especially these days.
Come up with a game design.
Now chop it into 3-5 pieces.
For the first part focus on the core mechanic and a few additional features.
Create enough thoroughly polished content to last about 3-10 hours.
Release the game and start the next piece immediately.
Use the kickback to fund the course of the next part.
etc.

Good luck!

[Lachie Dazdarian]

I so agree with PixelPiledriver on this. People put too much emphasis on the scope/size of their project when having an ambition to make an impact on the game design scene. Too be honest, I blame modern games plagued by inflation of content versus real gameplay value. Simply, the sheer volume of content obfuscates the flaws of the gameplay in many of current games (not that we didn't have games guilty of this transgression in the past). But it's the same in today's movies/books. They are valued now by length (at least by producers/publishers), number of action scenes, parallel subplots, plodding stories that go over 800 pages. I mean...a novel of 120 pages....that's not a novel...it's a short story for today's standards. Sad.

Sorry, I digressed.