AuthorTopic: -Reworking; job to be reposted soon-  (Read 7195 times)

Offline prosscct

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-Reworking; job to be reposted soon-

on: June 03, 2013, 09:30:44 pm
-changing terms of project; will repost soon-
« Last Edit: June 05, 2013, 08:53:27 pm by prosscct »

Offline rikfuzz

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Can you put up one of the original artists sprites?  It's a little hard to imagine a 'retro' sprite at such a large resolution (640x480).

Offline YellowLime

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Hell, 640x480... Wasn't that a legitimate screen resolution a decade ago? :lol:

Offline Ymedron

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Based on a prompt, sounds like a handy way to get free to use image resources. :U
Also makes me curious who the artist is, if they are so well-known and if it's imperative to copy their style really well.
Also my art tumblr: ymedronart.tumblr.com

Offline DaLk

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somewhat like rikfuzz said, "640x480" + "detailled" + "retro" don't compute. but as you come  with a very specific price per sprite, i assume you gave it some though first.

So, did you mean x8 pixels ?

else, i doubt anyone would do 80+ quadruple full-screen (for the 90's era) detailed pixel art for that sum :)

Offline YellowLime

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Ymedron makes two very good points.

Since there are always many artists looking for a job, the applications usually are plentiful.
I can see the concern of grabbing the "on-prompt" sprites and making a run for it, but the final quality of the art would be pretty inconsistent (even if you told the different artists to "adhere" to a specific art-style), and "conned" artists would (rightly so) make a fuzz about it. So even if the contractor got to keep the sprites, there'd be a lot of bad rep.

About the well-known artist, I'd also like to know, since it's assumed his art will be superior than that of whoever gets the job. :hehe:

Offline Ymedron

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Well, from what I know, folks might make you write an agreement where you give away copyright to the picture you send to them as a prompt. It's more worrisome in the illustrator business, I hear. :o!
But caution is best. I don't want to kill others' potential jobs either. <:U

Edit: Also I can't think of many legit reasons for a company to want a sample when they should rather check the artist's portfolio. If the artist is a hoax, it'll be found out when they send in the first draft.
« Last Edit: June 04, 2013, 07:02:58 pm by Ymedron »
Also my art tumblr: ymedronart.tumblr.com

Offline prosscct

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The sample art would remain in possession of the artist unless the artist was contracted to do the entire project.  It is merely to assess capability.  I have updated the prompt for clarity--we did not mean for each sprite to be precisely 640x480.  Rather, we want the art to be "at home" in that resolution, if that makes sense.  An average character would be about 215x215 based on the reference images we were using from Street Fighter 3. 

As you can probably tell, our grasp of the terminology is preliminary, so bear with us. 

We used this article to obtain our pricing structure:

http://2dwillneverdie.com/blog/how-much-do-sprites-cost/

We went with an average of the "high end" prices per sprite.  (Article lists high end price for 500 sprites at 7000-20,000; 7k + 20k = 27k/2 = $13,500/500 = $27/sprite.  We will gladly take some input from people as to whether or not that's a fair price, but from our offers that we have taken from some other potential candidates, we have determined this to be a fair, if not higher than usual, bounty.  However, it's entirely possible that we are not conversant enough with the actual process of producing good quality sprites to know what will go into this, so if we need an education in this respect, have at it.  We know the toy and illustration side, but the digital art is something new to us--we are only casually conversant in sprite art as gamers and fans.

We do not want to reveal any existing art at this time to protect the secrecy of the project.
« Last Edit: June 04, 2013, 09:43:14 pm by prosscct »

Offline Cyangmou

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sounds like you are only pricing for keys. Key frames take by far longer than inbetween frames of animations, because they are usually the real work.

I highly doubt any highly experienced pixel artist would do work for 15$/h. The knowledge level an artist needs to capture the anatomy and animate chars like in street fighter III is rather high.
Even if you don't need animations, but you need different poses the anatomical knowledge is still a must-have for the artist and 220x220 is also really high resolution for any kind of pixel art (110x110 is still high resolution).

Capcom had back then a few of the really best artists and the game still looks great today.

Your article has salary charges for hobbyists and for animations with key and inbetweens for characters based on simple edits.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AdamSaltsman/20090724/2571/Pixel_Art_Freelance_Best_Practices__Guidelines.php

http://www.freelancegraphicdesigner.info/freelance-graphic-design-hourly-rates.php
« Last Edit: June 04, 2013, 11:07:38 pm by Cyangmou »
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Offline rikfuzz

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215x215 is still pretty large (SF3 was about 130? though huge variations of course).

I really appreciate the honesty with the sum, but I still find the actual work load confusing, is it 86 characters with 8 frames each?  (688 sprites + fx + bgs?) I'm sure it's not right, but I'm having a little trouble understanding the brief.

Also personally I don't like doing spec work, especially as it's proposed here, though I'm sure it's been successful in other cases.

If I were looking for artists for this project I'd gather interested artists' folios or example work and contact suitable artists privately with some example artwork (NDA if necessary) before people are likely wasting their time trying to pitch for a style-matching gig where we can't even see the style to be matched (which is my main concern tbh). I'd prefer to contact artists in very small batches too (one or two at a time if possible), likely to get less rushed examples this way, and create fewer let-downs. That could potentially take a little longer though of course, but I think it's best for everyone, including yourself. (You'll definitely lose some options doing it otherwise - I imagine the really high standard artists are hesitant to do spec work outside of specifically invited art tests etc).