Decent is up for.. debate.... Im telling you a college student just out of grad school better have some serious fucking skill to get 25k for all of those. You can find most of that on unity assest store for 100$. It may not be fully custom but it gives you the concept of what can be done. I don't know, would need to see reference art to tell you the value. How fast they provide the content and how many revisions you force also plays a factor. :)

Decent is up for.. debate.... Im telling you a college student just out of grad school better have some serious fucking skill to get 25k for all of those.

She just graduated from college, not a grad student, and 25K is my grand total budget, for everything, so I doubt I can pay more than 10k for a art budget, and that's pushing it.

What she wants is $20 a frame, for a frame by frame, 2d sprite.

It is not unreasonable, per say. Im not fully up on my 2d rates. Would have to do some searching for ya.

That would help a ton, I just don't think we could afford the $20, unless the frames in the animation are too high.

I hear that animation studios used to outsource to Korea a lot. How's your Korean these days, GoldBlaze?

OK, I probably should have read the last few post of riathmus and goldblaze before post my own opinion. Seems you are way ahead of me.

Left my noobish babbling in there for reference (so you can laugh at my inability to read the full thread before posting :) )

Anyway, good luck with your search for artists, goldblaze.

Well, a lot of it also comes down to the skill of the people you hire.

Most people asking for a ridicolous sum might not be worth the money... though some actually might be. And in some cases you might end up paying LESS in the end.

On the other hand, the cheap artists might be living in a country with much lower wages and cost of living. They might also be beginners that don't have the courage yet to ask for more. Or they might cut corners somewhere that might end costing you much more.

Best thing IMO is to see if you can ask them to finish a small piece for you. Look at the quality of the finished piece, but also how quickly they deliver and how good they are to work with.

If you pay an artist a lot that always delivers on time, actually knows exactly what you want with just your initial brief, and in a quality that meets or exceeds your expectations, you might ending up paying less in total yet getting assets when you need them compared to the cheap artists that always delivers late, needs you to regularly give feedback because he doesn't seem to get what you really want, and delivers shoody quality that needs to be redone over and over.

Best case with the bad artist is that you can negotiate a fixed price and he will have to redo suff on his own expense, but even then you get things late.

I would set aside 1000-ish $ of your budget just to find the right people. Spending 100-ish $ on learning that an artist is NOT the right person for the job sound like a small expense in the big picture

When it comes to paying them, my list of favourites would be this:

best case: fixed price per asset

failing that: fixed price per hour/day/week

worst case: royalities of gross profit

Negotiating a fixed price per asset will let you plan ahead what you can do with your budget better, and will prevent unpleasant surprises. It also shows that the artist is confident on what he can deliver in what time, which points to a real professional.

Royalities might end up costing you less than you think (After all, you don't know if your game will sell AT ALL), but AFAIK exactly for that reason most professionals prefer fixed payments over royality/profit-sharing schemas. Some of the high-end pros might negotiate some kind of royalities as a bonus with a project they know will sell, but never without securing a good fixed payment before that.

To me, an artist asking for part of the gross profit in a small Indie game, that isn't part of the startup team and thus kind of a "partner", looks very unprofessional.

I am also game designer , but must say that creating art for game is really harder than creating some business website design . Cause creating the art for game isn`t that easy at all and it takes really more time than creating the simple flat professional website design.

Instead of paying 20 dollars a frame times a crap load of frames I would just pay someone to make a 3 model and animate it. Once its animated you can have blender spit out as many 2d frames and directions as you want. The cost of modeling and animating may be the same or less but a animated 3d model is way more useful to have then 2d sprites.

Instead of paying 20 dollars a frame times a crap load of frames I would just pay someone to make a 3 model and animate it. Once its animated you can have blender spit out as many 2d frames and directions as you want. The cost of modeling and animating may be the same or less but a animated 3d model is way more useful to have then 2d sprites.

+1

IF this is acceptable for the intended art style, you could save a lot of money. 3D art has more overhead to get a simple model on the screen, as 2D art gets more high-end with a 2.5D isometric style and smoother animations, 3D start becoming cheaper quickly.

Also, you can tap into a completly different pool of freelancers and artists, that MIGHT (or might not, IDK really) be cheaper or more freely available to work with.

Maybe check if this is an acceptable solution before commiting to an expensive 2D freelancing relationship..