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[Servbot24]

Wow, I'm a little disappointed in the responses. Instead of disconnected, complete cynicism and arrogance. Damn, if people can do everything from making characters and sound effects for SG, maybe try hitting up Lab Zero with your portfolio.

They don't have a place on their site about jobs, and given the recent layoffs I doubt they're looking to hire. But I've sent my portfolio to lots of places, just waiting for that lucky break.

But that's not the point. The point is that these Skullgirls characters are very simple. Design and model should easily be done in a week. I understand that the animations will need to be very fine tuned and precise, and I don't have in depth experience doing that, but still... boggles my mind that it could cost such an incredible amount. :/

 

[beril]

I don't get those prices at all. Pretty sure I could design, model, rig, animate, do a theme song, record some grunts and do testing for single character in well under a year, and 150k is more than I could ever dream of making.

I don't think the number itself is that outlandish for a professional studio, what I don't quite get is what the eight employees are doing when most of the work apparently is outsourced. You'd think the animations would be 90% of the costs for a 2D fighting game character. Not sure what hitbox contracting actually means, but if that implementing the characters moves and tweaking the hitboxes, I'm not really sure what's left

 

[The Faceless Master]

Not sure if serious..

Modders make alternative costumes for free.. look at skyrim's mods for example.

modders make entire games for free.

game engines too.

 

[reelbigtink]

$4,000 for voice recording?

I've recorded decent sounding albums with my band (12 songs) for $2,000. Not in the US, of course, but still, that is just an insane price. Here you can find excellent studios that charge no more that $60/hour.

Yeah, this.

I've spent a lot of time in recording studios. $4,000 for a few good takes of "I'LL PLAY WITH YOU SOME OTHER TIME" is extremely ridiculous. I wish I could con people out of that much money and sleep at night.

 

[JordanN]

Of course, doesn't that explain why there are so many 3D CGI animated movies? Also it's much harder work to tweak around little animations.

Some of the most expensive movies are CGI. For a recent comparison, Toy Story 3 cost more than The Princess and the Frog to make.

Although the tweaking part is correct. With a model, someone can just edit a rig whereas animation requires whole new frames.

 

[mr2xxx]

Holy shit, I thought it was the whole game and it seemed reasonable but one character! No wonder Mortal Kombat had so many ninjas.

 

[Coolwhip]

Voice actors tend to have minimum costs to even show up, rent the time for the studio, have a proper director in the studio, then pay for all the techs.

$4,000 is cheap for VA.

I don't think it's cheap at all. I have recorded with a professional voice actor before and that didn't go above $500 with the studio included.

 

[Lijik]

I imagine if you want to hit a quality players expect in the time frame they want, that is absolutely reasonable for a budget.

All the people saying a 2d animated character with a robust moveset should be done with one person including voice acting on a shoestring budget should watch Animal Soccer World or something

 

[dLMN8R]

The industry has gotten too specialized. We shouldn't need 8 professional and a voice actor to do one minor thing.

Why do you think it's a minor thing to create a fully voiced 2D animated fully-balanced complex fighting game character?

 

[FyreWulff]

I don't think it's cheap at all. I have recorded with a professional voice actor before and that didn't go above $500 with the studio included.

What was the actor's skill level and how many lines?

 

[SixMachine]

For voice recording you also have to take in account there needs to be a sound director and someone writing the script for needs to be said. I wonder if it also accounts for the person making the sound hit effects and foley for the character. So that $4000 might be split up between 3-5 people after equipment and studio costs are taken into account.

edit: NVM I just noticed there is audio implementation listed there too.

 

[Holy Order Sol]

Wow where can I sign up for this job? How many lines can 1 character in a fighting game have?

For ArcSys games you might as well end up reciting the fucking Bible.

 

[oconnomiyaki]

I think there's just a disconnect with expectations versus reality with software in general. At work, there is a task that is currently being undertaken in order to add some functionality. It's going to take three developers a couple of months, and this doesn't include the time for design, QA, release certification, etc. One comment on our forums said "It's a simple feature that should take a couple of days at most."

 

[dLMN8R]

why can't these be done by the staff who is already getting paid? what are these 8 people doing?

Erm, because they're actually designing, implementing, and balancing the character itself and how it plays?

 

[Kai Dracon]

I suddenly wonder how much the indie game scene has affected the average person's expectations (along with the modding community, etc).

While it's true that a lot of indie games, in this example, are made by a small number of people with a small amount of money, it seems most of people creating those games know they must stay away from certain kinds of production values or they won't be able to handle it.

In other words, there's a reason why so many indie games "go retro" with their visual style, sometimes soundtrack, and don't often have stuff like a lot of professional voice acting. Unless they get lucky and someone donates time, talent, and facilities on the cheap or for free.

Then of course there is the issue that professionals get paid professionally, because that's the payoff of having years of experience and refined talent.

IMO, you don't truly begin to see "needless bloat" until you get into the world's giant studios where 150 people are thrown at a modest project due to mismanagement and bad policies. That's where you see millions, not thousands, of dollars wasted.

 

[border]

It's not $150,000 for one character though. Once you take out Microsoft's fee, the IndieGoGo fee, and the physical rewards.....it's only $110,000.

The only part of those costs that seems kinda bogus to me is the $20,000 for QA testing a single character. QA testers make pretty much no money, right? Maybe like $10-15/hour. Does a single character really need 1000+ hours of QA?

 

[SixMachine]

I bet people will have their brains explode when they find out how much Blur gets paid to make 3min trailers.

It's not $150,000 for one character though. Once you take out Microsoft's fee, the IndieGoGo fee, and the physical rewards.....it's only $110,000.

The only part of those costs that seems kinda bogus to me is the $20,000 for QA testing a single character. QA testers make pretty much no money, right? Maybe like $10-15/hour. Does a single character really need 1000+ hours of QA?

They need to test that character against others and when partnered up. They mentioned it being an n-squared problem and it makes sense for a fighting game. Having character specific matchup bugs and glitches could break a game. It has unfortunately happened before and found too late in some games. IIRC in KOF12 when Raiden used his super on Elizabeth it froze her character and basically ended the round. It's also probably not just one person, and probably a small group that has to test things against each other.

 

[Esura]

Wow where can I sign up for this job? How many lines can 1 character in a fighting game have?

If it's an ArcSys game...a lot.

 

[Rehynn]

That's the cost for the studio. Obviously, recording your own material, you're not charging yourself for your own time, or charging yourself for the future use of your own material. Not to mention the cost of an audio engineer, who might come separately depending on the needs of the project.

I know, and the $2,000 I mentioned included recording, mixing and mastering. With two engineers involved.

US studio prices must be insane.

 

[wonzo]

It doesn't matter who does what. I'm just saying 150k is a lot of hours. Not surprising videogames are so expensive to make when this is acceptable in the industry.

Yes, the nerve of those people getting paid a decent wage for their work.

 

[RiccochetJ]

I know, and the $2,000 I mentioned included recording, mixing and mastering. With two engineers involved.

US studio prices must be insane.

They're in LA. I could easily see it being more expensive than most places.

 

[tokkun]

See now I'm confused. Now I'm no marketing expert and I'm definitely not the smartest guy in what for what costs. Anyways how do you make a profit on a game if it actually takes this much money to make even just a single character.

I would presume that a lot of these costs would be lower per character if they were amortized over 10 characters.

Producing a single character is probably fairly inefficient, in terms of fixed overhead costs (like certification), contracting costs (you can negotiate better rates for larger jobs or go with salaried employees), and efficiency of the people you do have on staff (I figure that if you're only working on one character there will be time when some of those programmers are stalled and have nothing productive to do because they are waiting on feedback from QA or outsourced materials).

 

[Master Milk]

a non graphically intensive game

What game are you talking about? Certainly not Skullgirls, a game where characters have 1300+ hand-drawn frames.

I don't think the number itself is that outlandish for a professional studio, what I don't quite get is what the eight employees are doing when most of the work apparently is outsourced. You'd think the animations would be 90% of the costs for a 2D fighting game character. Not sure what hitbox contracting actually means, but if that implementing the characters moves and tweaking the hitboxes, I'm not really sure what's left

Here's a video of a recent panel the team did talking about the art process.

 

[FStop7]

Oh. I thought this was about the headphones.

 

[gryz]

what I don't quite get is what the eight employees are doing when most of the work apparently is outsourced.

yep. it seems like all the work is completely separate from the staff of 8. if they aren't testing, animating, implementing hitboxes, implementing audio wtf are they doing? why not just hire more people for the staff to do these things?

 

[XANDER CAGE]

I see a lot of discussions where people think that salaries are independent of game budgets (or pretty much any budget), so it's nice to see that being cleared up.

 

[Yabdbadbdadbda]

I bet people will have their brains explode when they find out how much Blur gets paid to make 3min trailers.

"why does something you can sit down and make for free in 3ds max cost so much money"

 

[sorakirosaki]

What game are you talking about? Certainly not Skullgirls, a game where characters have 1300+ hand-drawn frames.



Here's a video of a recent panel the team did talking about the art process.

Man that video is amazing O_O all that animation and pre-production lots of respect for this studio


some of the stuff they are doing for squiggly are preety impressive

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3vE-i8yg_s&list=PLyv08xUBuVkKMtgq47JwntBt87QSwqZzo

that tag in

 

[Sandfox]

If video games worked the way some of the people in this topic thin we wouldn't need to pay $60 for big name titles.

Lab Zero is a small company that has only been around for four months as well so I don't think its fair to say that they should have staff do all the crap they need already on hand(which is a dumb thing to say in the first place).

 

[Guevara]

Yes, the nerve of those people getting paid a decent wage for their work.

No one is saying that. The problem isn't what these people are paid, the problem is how many professionals are required to do the work (and then they still outsource so much).

 

[Reallink]

This is bat shit insane, it's incredible what kind of comically bloated monetary value people are willing to place on their time and efforts. Nothing about adding a character to this game even comes close to having this much worth. This is something I would expect a single artistically inclined modder could do his spare time for $0--not 8 "professionals" 10 weeks with most of the work contracted out.

 

[Lijik]

You can do 1000+ frames of hand-drawn animation, and have up to half of that re-done due to gameplay tweaks in a week?

Seriously, fuck the gaming industry, Disney will snap you up in a second. They won't have to worry about the budgetary concerns of hand-drawn animation when you could get a full-length feature done for them in three months by yourself!

I also like how the designs of the characters are "simple" so it should be done in a week i guess because they're toony, which is ignoring all the costume details which would need to be kept relatively consistent in the animation.

EDIT- im out. all these people saying a professionally animated 1000+ frame character should be done in a week for free is pissing me off

 

[Mutanthands]

The amount of ignorance in this thread about the real world costs of hiring (and keeping people paid), renting space and equipment, and other expenses is staggering. For some of you, your thought processes on how games get made border on magical thinking.

You can't record game audio in the corner office with a laptop. And setting up a proper studio can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Not to mention that people have to feed their families.

 

[vocab]

Seth killian I believe said it costs as much to do an alternate costume in SF4

That is full of fucking shit though.

 

[Messofanego]

Hitbox contracter sounds like the coolest job title you can have.

 

[XANDER CAGE]

This is bat shit insane, it's incredible what kind of comically bloated monetary value people are willing to place on their time and efforts. Nothing about adding a character to this game even comes close to having this much worth. This is something I would expect a single artistically inclined modder could do his spare time for $0--not 8 "professionals" 10 weeks with most of the work contracted out.

You know that a lot of modders are people trying to get jobs doing what they're good at, right? You know that animation is incredibly difficult, right?

 

[VariantX]

What game are you talking about? Certainly not Skullgirls, a game where characters have 1300+ hand-drawn frames.



Here's a video of a recent panel the team did talking about the art process.

Not to mention all of those frames have to be reasonably detailed because the game is meant to be output at HD resolution. There's no half-assing it without it making your art look bad.

 

[Coolwhip]

The amount of ignorance in this thread about the real world costs of hiring (and keeping people paid), renting space and equipment, and other expenses is staggering. For some of you, your thought processes on how games get made border on magical thinking.

You can't record game audio in the corner office with a laptop. And setting up a proper studio can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Not to mention that people have to feed their families.

Setting up a studio of tens of thousands of dollars for an indie game? How many characters does skullgirls have btw?

 

[10101]

Generally yes.

Traditional animation is insanely expensive, and takes a lot more time to do than to model a character in 3D and then animate it. Just think about what needs to happen if say... you want the legs to be slightly thinner. You then need to alter every frame, as opposed to just changing the mesh once.

Wow do they really sit there and draw every image? This is the 21st century lol. Surely there are tools which can take a image and animate it using simple parameters? Like for example you could highlight a mouth, create some vectors and manipulate it in a given way then track the changes to create an animation.

If there isn't I'm going to look into writing one, could be a earner

 

[FStop7]

I don't get those prices at all. Pretty sure I could design, model, rig, animate, do a theme song, record some grunts and do testing for single character in a year, even if I had to do a lot of learning along the way, and 150k is more than I could ever dream of making in even a year.

What do you do for a living?

 

[NoirVisage]

For 150k you can get about 1000 hours of work done by a professional. 1000 hours for a character in a videogame? Sounds like a bloated mess.

Agreed, and everyone swallowed it down hook line and sinker. someone should ask them how much their entire game took to make.

 

[-GJ-]

This is very recognizable. I'm a graphic designer myself and I do a little bit of freelance work every now and then, and even though I don't ask a lot of money for my work I get a lot of "Why is it so expensive? It's just a picture." or "I would like to have the final result in an hour, because it's just a picture so it shouldn't take that long." kind of emails.

Even though something doesn't seem expensive or looks like it wouldn't be expensive to make doesn't mean it's not expensive.

 

[Aeris130]

Sounds like some posters here have a lot of money to make by offering the industry their cost-saving knowledge. I'm sure Activision would pay millions of dollars to anyone capable of cutting their development costs by just 5%. Go get it.

 

[Feep]

I'm actually a voice actor in Skull Girls (one of the soldiers who steps in for Parasoul, at times). Trust me, they're quite thrifty about it...it was a smaller scale operation at a local place here in Burbank, WAY less costly than a lot of major recording studios, but still high quality. They're spending even less than I'll be spending on my technically smaller-scale project, as I've got Wil Wheaton and needed to drop a fair bit on a place that also acts as a SAG/AFTRA signatory.

 

[dLMN8R]

yep. it seems like all the work is completely separate from the staff of 8. if they aren't testing, animating, implementing hitboxes, implementing audio wtf are they doing? why not just hire more people for the staff to do these things?

They're, you know, designing the character.

How does it work?
What moves does it have?
How does it interact with other characters? Specifically unique character-on-character interactions that change depending on the moves other characters have?
What combo and unique abilities does it have? How does it differentiate itself from other characters? What is its purpose for existing?
What dialog does it speak? What do the voice recorders actually need to record?
What in general should it look like? What is actually being animated?

 

[sorakirosaki]

Wow do they really sit there and draw every image? This is the 21st century lol. Surely there are tools which can take a image and animate it using simple parameters? Like for example you could highlight a mouth, create some vectors and manipulate it in a given way then track the changes to create an animation.

If there isn't I'm going to look into writing one, could be a earner

Actually i have a few animator friends (they all go to sheridan) i have seen their art process
hand drawn animation is all fully drawn. The ones who do the traditional way draw every single frame as it gives the animation fludity and makes it more believable. I havent seen any programs that could let you do what you described however

 

[Mutanthands]

Setting up a studio of tens of thousands of dollars for an indie game? How many characters does skullgirls have btw?

A proper audio studio for recording cost big money. That's why they have to rent a professional studio for the audio.

 

[Reallink]

Wow, so this thread is just another opportunity for people to spew the exact ignorance the article addresses. It's kind of shitty to say stuff like this when the people in question are taking a pay cut to get this done.

When was the last time you saw an indie 2D fighter with original characters that have 1000+ hand drawn frames of animation?

This ain't exactly photoshopping the grime off of the female faces for a Skyrim mod.

I assumed that's what the $30,000 animation contractor expense was for...

 

[RiccochetJ]

Wow do they really sit there and draw every image? This is the 21st century lol. Surely there are tools which can take a image and animate it using simple parameters? Like for example you could highlight a mouth, create some vectors and manipulate it in a given way then track the changes to create an animation.

If there isn't I'm going to look into writing one, could be a earner

How much will you license it for? Just for future reference when people want to bitch at you for how expensive it is

 

[JakkuFurosu]

Sounds like some posters here have a lot of money to make by offering the industry their cost-saving knowledge. I'm sure Activision would pay millions of dollars to anyone capable of cutting their development costs by just 5%. Go get it.

seriously.

i said wow to alot of comments on this story (the 4 different articles ive read).