stuff
What he said.
stuff
I really appreciate that post Raging Spaniard. I hope it sheds some light onto some of the ignorance here.
You guys really needed that much assurance? Kind of proves his point. But I'm all for more support.
Here is some reference from my own experiences. Typically I dont like to share these kinds of details with people who just DEMAND information they havent earned, but discussion has shifted here a bit and its good to see.
I was one of the contractors, well, still am! I did some of the cleanup animation. By the time I got an assignment, the animation rough had been approved by Kinuko and at this point it could make the final game or it could not (thats all in the testing, balancing and memory management) Smartasses in this thread have questioned the need for engineers in a game thats already "done" and thats a big mistake. The original game had to have animations cut because we had run out of memory, so on a technical standpoint, how the fuck are we gonna add more characters? Well shit, good thing theres engineers on the team to figure that shit out, huh? Thats only one of the challenges too.
But anyways, to the point. You may get a short animation (6 frames aprox), medium (12, 15 ish) or large (20 plus) theres also varying degrees of importance (normal move vs animation that only triggers when two duplicate characters hit each other with the same move) and theres also character design details to add to the difficulty (Valentine is more simple than Painwheel, for example). One extra wrinkle is the level of sketchiness in the animation rough. Some animators will make the drawings so tight that theres no room for improvisation while others will basically blank out the face and all of a sudden you find yourself animating faces from scratch!)
For an outsourcer, since you dont have access to the team at your immediate need, its important to be diligent with the reference materials. Very few artists draw like Alex or Kinuko and its our job to make our art look exactly like theirs. If you look at my art youll find that my style is not really close, so I cant just start on the task right away, I need to study the reference provided carefully and make sure I "get" the character before I start.
So once you start, the first deliverable is to digitally ink all the frames. Im a clasically trained 2D animator and have a fulltime art gig, so eventhough Im fast I can only start working on this when I get home. This is another of the unfortunate realities that come with an ambitious project like this, that a lot of outside help already has other projects going on, so they cant give you 8 hours a day. I came home at 7 after drawing all day and spent another 5 hours doing Skullgirls work. Typically after two days I would send a medium sized animation over for approval from Richard, who is the awesome cleanup genius at Lab Zero. Approval usually takes about a day because Richard is getting deliverables from the outsources, who if you have seen the credits are way more than 20 ... So basically Richard is art directing 20+ people AND doing cleanup work himself, meaning he basically doesnt get to go home (so its great to have to listen to assholes here tell me that he needs to justify his $600 a week) I had the pleasure of meeting him a few months back and hes going gray already, haha.
So yeah, approval. While I wait for that to show up I get started on the next frame. Very rarely does the linework get approved on the first try. Usually something is inconsistent, a weapon looks weird or the shapes are a little flat. Depending on the damage you may have to do 20% percent of work or maybe even up to 50. Its important to get this stuff approved because otherwise you cant move on to shading and coloring, which are the next steps.
Once youre approved and do the shading and color pass (which take about 60% of the time it takes to ink) you send those off for approval as well, make some last minute touch ups due to feedback and THEN the animation is done on your end. Before it ends in the game proper, chances are Richard has fixed some things himself ... So Id say on average I could get about 60 ish frames of animation a week, and seeing how the character with the FEWEST amount of animations has about 1500 then you start to get an idea of how just one step of the process works.
THEN we look at Squigly. What a lot of you arent realizing is that she has MULTIPLE STANCES. What does that mean? TWICE THE ANIMATIONS.
Can you start to see how the hours pile up and have NOTHING to do with proper managing? A fighting game is unlike any other game. A character in a fighting game is the equivalent of a character + level design + the game design of any other game.
But hey yeah, lazy devs, right?
Double Fine Adventure was never going to cost 400k. They have since said they wildly underestimated the cost of the project, as well as the cost to them to ship out the rewards goods. If they had only gotten 400k, it would have probably been a flash game with little to no animation, and been about fifteen minutes long.considering that Double Fine Adventure was initially planned with a budget of 400k while it costs 120k just to make one fighter it kind of makes sense that we get so few fighting games nowadays. Other game types just seem to be much more cost effective
Yeah. What about it?Well when someone calls the work you do not worth the price it's kind of hard not to get angry.
Here is some reference from my own experiences. Typically I dont like to share these kinds of details with people who just DEMAND information they havent earned, but discussion has shifted here a bit and its good to see.
I was one of the contractors, well, still am! I did some of the cleanup animation. By the time I got an assignment, the animation rough had been approved by Kinuko and at this point it could make the final game or it could not (thats all in the testing, balancing and memory management) Smartasses in this thread have questioned the need for engineers in a game thats already "done" and thats a big mistake. The original game had to have animations cut because we had run out of memory, so on a technical standpoint, how the fuck are we gonna add more characters? Well shit, good thing theres engineers on the team to figure that shit out, huh? Thats only one of the challenges too.
But anyways, to the point. You may get a short animation (6 frames aprox), medium (12, 15 ish) or large (20 plus) theres also varying degrees of importance (normal move vs animation that only triggers when two duplicate characters hit each other with the same move) and theres also character design details to add to the difficulty (Valentine is more simple than Painwheel, for example). One extra wrinkle is the level of sketchiness in the animation rough. Some animators will make the drawings so tight that theres no room for improvisation while others will basically blank out the face and all of a sudden you find yourself animating faces from scratch!)
For an outsourcer, since you dont have access to the team at your immediate need, its important to be diligent with the reference materials. Very few artists draw like Alex or Kinuko and its our job to make our art look exactly like theirs. If you look at my art youll find that my style is not really close, so I cant just start on the task right away, I need to study the reference provided carefully and make sure I "get" the character before I start.
So once you start, the first deliverable is to digitally ink all the frames. Im a clasically trained 2D animator and have a fulltime art gig, so eventhough Im fast I can only start working on this when I get home. This is another of the unfortunate realities that come with an ambitious project like this, that a lot of outside help already has other projects going on, so they cant give you 8 hours a day. I came home at 7 after drawing all day and spent another 5 hours doing Skullgirls work. Typically after two days I would send a medium sized animation over for approval from Richard, who is the awesome cleanup genius at Lab Zero. Approval usually takes about a day because Richard is getting deliverables from the outsources, who if you have seen the credits are way more than 20 ... So basically Richard is art directing 20+ people AND doing cleanup work himself, meaning he basically doesnt get to go home (so its great to have to listen to assholes here tell me that he needs to justify his $600 a week) I had the pleasure of meeting him a few months back and hes going gray already, haha.
So yeah, approval. While I wait for that to show up I get started on the next frame. Very rarely does the linework get approved on the first try. Usually something is inconsistent, a weapon looks weird or the shapes are a little flat. Depending on the damage you may have to do 20% percent of work or maybe even up to 50. Its important to get this stuff approved because otherwise you cant move on to shading and coloring, which are the next steps.
Once youre approved and do the shading and color pass (which take about 60% of the time it takes to ink) you send those off for approval as well, make some last minute touch ups due to feedback and THEN the animation is done on your end. Before it ends in the game proper, chances are Richard has fixed some things himself ... So Id say on average I could get about 60 ish frames of animation a week, and seeing how the character with the FEWEST amount of animations has about 1500 then you start to get an idea of how just one step of the process works.
THEN we look at Squigly. What a lot of you arent realizing is that she has MULTIPLE STANCES. What does that mean? TWICE THE ANIMATIONS.
Can you start to see how the hours pile up and have NOTHING to do with proper managing? A fighting game is unlike any other game. A character in a fighting game is the equivalent of a character + level design + the game design of any other game.
But hey yeah, lazy devs, right?
In any industry, the most expensive part of the project is labor.
If you have say, 10 people working on the project for 2 month, that would be already close to $60,000 given that you are paying $3000 per person, which is not a lot by any means.
If you add insurance and other equipment fees, that quickly escalate into six figure range.
Although I would never buy skullgirls (art style is just is not my liking), I understand why it would cost so much to create just ONE character. Game is not cheap to make fellas.
That's why it's fucking amazing that one single guy made vanguard princess. O_O
That's why it's fucking amazing that one single guy made vanguard princess. O_O
Well, it also helps that the one guy used Fighter Maker to make that game.
That's just the engine. One still need to make every animation which is the HARDEST part.
The problem with a lot of the comments regarding this is pretty simple. They are posted by kids, teens, and some adults with little education in typical business subjects. They lack any form of business acumen yet presume they have the authority and expertise to comment "factually" on matters such as this.
Armchair business men. I have little time for them.
This post is not elitist at all.
Then start.
If you can design, model and animate a character equal to the quality of your average Skullgirls character in a week, you could post it here, blow all us out of the water and maybe get a job while you're at it.
A 3D artist? You think the characters in the game are 3D?
OK, fine. Here, this took me about 2.5 hours:
Now obviously this isn't quite the right style (I don't play this game or usually draw in this style), the design could be a bit better, it's not as polished as the official art work, but you get the idea. It doesn't take very long to design a character. I have better things to do than model this, but it's a pretty easy process that an experienced 3D artist could definitely do in a couple days. Animation obviously would take a lot longer and I never said I could do that in a week. That would take close to a year.
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
Around here, 2D = cheap. It's a sad mentality that probably won't ever go away
People thinking that these characters are simple to animate and clean up clearly have not done much 2d animation before, if at all. Consistent detail and line thickness across all the outsourcers, making it look like one artist did all the drawings for a character when in reality its closer to 20 ... Im used to being taken for granted by non-artists, but when somebody who should know better spouts this stuff, its pretty disheartening.
Jesus, this thread.
Btw, $150k a pop means the character budget for this indie game was $2.85 million.
This might be the craziest thing I've ever read, people honestly think there is software that can magically do this?
The key thing to note is: They're not trying to release this "in a year." So it doesn't matter that it took you 2.5 hours to do that. I'm not even sure how you can acknowledge that it would take you a year (rough estimate) to animate it all but then say you don't understand why it costs so much when they're trying to release it within months.
who is cristina vee and why is she in skullgirls?
Just as a tangential question from a jackass who knows nothing about any of this stuff, what is the effort required of current high-end computer animation now versus hand-drawn animation? And what I mean is that I know in the mid 90s, a big part of the appeal of gambling on a feature-length film from Pixar was that it took far fewer people to animate Toy Story than it did to animate a Disney hand-drawn film. But what's the comparison now? What would the projected number of man hours be to make Toy Story 4 for instance for a 2016 release versus, say, The Lion King 3 for a 2016 release?
Just as a tangential question from a jackass who knows nothing about any of this stuff, what is the effort required of current high-end computer animation now versus hand-drawn animation? And what I mean is that I know in the mid 90s, a big part of the appeal of gambling on a feature-length film from Pixar was that it took far fewer people to animate Toy Story than it did to animate a Disney hand-drawn film. But what's the comparison now? What would the projected number of man hours be to make Toy Story 4 for instance for a 2016 release versus, say, The Lion King 3 for a 2016 release?
I feel like I had a reasonable idea as to how much this kind of stuff costs and why it costs what it does, but what blows me away is the salaries these guys are taking. Seriously, $600 a week? You guys are worth more than that and it sounds like you're burning yourselves out to boot. Is it really worth it?
Here is some reference from my own experiences. Typically I dont like to share these kinds of details with people who just DEMAND information they havent earned, but discussion has shifted here a bit and its good to see.
I was one of the contractors, well, still am! I did some of the cleanup animation. By the time I got an assignment, the animation rough had been approved by Kinuko and at this point it could make the final game or it could not (thats all in the testing, balancing and memory management) Smartasses in this thread have questioned the need for engineers in a game thats already "done" and thats a big mistake. The original game had to have animations cut because we had run out of memory, so on a technical standpoint, how the fuck are we gonna add more characters? Well shit, good thing theres engineers on the team to figure that shit out, huh? Thats only one of the challenges too.
But anyways, to the point. You may get a short animation (6 frames aprox), medium (12, 15 ish) or large (20 plus) theres also varying degrees of importance (normal move vs animation that only triggers when two duplicate characters hit each other with the same move) and theres also character design details to add to the difficulty (Valentine is more simple than Painwheel, for example). One extra wrinkle is the level of sketchiness in the animation rough. Some animators will make the drawings so tight that theres no room for improvisation while others will basically blank out the face and all of a sudden you find yourself animating faces from scratch!)
For an outsourcer, since you dont have access to the team at your immediate need, its important to be diligent with the reference materials. Very few artists draw like Alex or Kinuko and its our job to make our art look exactly like theirs. If you look at my art youll find that my style is not really close, so I cant just start on the task right away, I need to study the reference provided carefully and make sure I "get" the character before I start.
So once you start, the first deliverable is to digitally ink all the frames. Im a clasically trained 2D animator and have a fulltime art gig, so eventhough Im fast I can only start working on this when I get home. This is another of the unfortunate realities that come with an ambitious project like this, that a lot of outside help already has other projects going on, so they cant give you 8 hours a day. I came home at 7 after drawing all day and spent another 5 hours doing Skullgirls work. Typically after two days I would send a medium sized animation over for approval from Richard, who is the awesome cleanup genius at Lab Zero. Approval usually takes about a day because Richard is getting deliverables from the outsources, who if you have seen the credits are way more than 20 ... So basically Richard is art directing 20+ people AND doing cleanup work himself, meaning he basically doesnt get to go home (so its great to have to listen to assholes here tell me that he needs to justify his $600 a week) I had the pleasure of meeting him a few months back and hes going gray already, haha.
So yeah, approval. While I wait for that to show up I get started on the next frame. Very rarely does the linework get approved on the first try. Usually something is inconsistent, a weapon looks weird or the shapes are a little flat. Depending on the damage you may have to do 20% percent of work or maybe even up to 50. Its important to get this stuff approved because otherwise you cant move on to shading and coloring, which are the next steps.
Once youre approved and do the shading and color pass (which take about 60% of the time it takes to ink) you send those off for approval as well, make some last minute touch ups due to feedback and THEN the animation is done on your end. Before it ends in the game proper, chances are Richard has fixed some things himself ... So Id say on average I could get about 60 ish frames of animation a week, and seeing how the character with the FEWEST amount of animations has about 1500 then you start to get an idea of how just one step of the process works.
THEN we look at Squigly. What a lot of you arent realizing is that she has MULTIPLE STANCES. What does that mean? TWICE THE ANIMATIONS.
Can you start to see how the hours pile up and have NOTHING to do with proper managing? A fighting game is unlike any other game. A character in a fighting game is the equivalent of a character + level design + the game design of any other game.
But hey yeah, lazy devs, right?
I feel like I had a reasonable idea as to how much this kind of stuff costs and why it costs what it does, but what blows me away is the salaries these guys are taking. Seriously, $600 a week? You guys are worth more than that and it sounds like you're burning yourselves out to boot. Is it really worth it?
Definitely. Not a very uncommon price of admission, however.They love the game and want to do more work for it. Dedication, yo.
15 bucks an hour is the bare minimum they needed so, that's what they asked for. Considering the talent you need to do that work, 15 bucks is well undervaluing their skill sets.
Just as a tangential question from a jackass who knows nothing about any of this stuff, what is the effort required of current high-end computer animation now versus hand-drawn animation? And what I mean is that I know in the mid 90s, a big part of the appeal of gambling on a feature-length film from Pixar was that it took far fewer people to animate Toy Story than it did to animate a Disney hand-drawn film. But what's the comparison now? What would the projected number of man hours be to make Toy Story 4 for instance for a 2016 release versus, say, The Lion King 3 for a 2016 release?
OK, fine. Here, this took me about 2.5 hours:
Now obviously this isn't quite the right style (I don't play this game or usually draw in this style), the design could be a bit better, it's not as polished as the official art work, but you get the idea. It doesn't take very long to design a character. I have better things to do than model this, but it's a pretty easy process that an experienced 3D artist could definitely do in a couple days. Animation obviously would take a lot longer and I never said I could do that in a week. That would take close to a year.
Here is some reference from my own experiences. Typically I dont like to share these kinds of details with people who just DEMAND information they havent earned, but discussion has shifted here a bit and its good to see.
I was one of the contractors, well, still am! I did some of the cleanup animation. By the time I got an assignment, the animation rough had been approved by Kinuko and at this point it could make the final game or it could not (thats all in the testing, balancing and memory management) Smartasses in this thread have questioned the need for engineers in a game thats already "done" and thats a big mistake. The original game had to have animations cut because we had run out of memory, so on a technical standpoint, how the fuck are we gonna add more characters? Well shit, good thing theres engineers on the team to figure that shit out, huh? Thats only one of the challenges too.
But anyways, to the point. You may get a short animation (6 frames aprox), medium (12, 15 ish) or large (20 plus) theres also varying degrees of importance (normal move vs animation that only triggers when two duplicate characters hit each other with the same move) and theres also character design details to add to the difficulty (Valentine is more simple than Painwheel, for example). One extra wrinkle is the level of sketchiness in the animation rough. Some animators will make the drawings so tight that theres no room for improvisation while others will basically blank out the face and all of a sudden you find yourself animating faces from scratch!)
For an outsourcer, since you dont have access to the team at your immediate need, its important to be diligent with the reference materials. Very few artists draw like Alex or Kinuko and its our job to make our art look exactly like theirs. If you look at my art youll find that my style is not really close, so I cant just start on the task right away, I need to study the reference provided carefully and make sure I "get" the character before I start.
So once you start, the first deliverable is to digitally ink all the frames. Im a clasically trained 2D animator and have a fulltime art gig, so eventhough Im fast I can only start working on this when I get home. This is another of the unfortunate realities that come with an ambitious project like this, that a lot of outside help already has other projects going on, so they cant give you 8 hours a day. I came home at 7 after drawing all day and spent another 5 hours doing Skullgirls work. Typically after two days I would send a medium sized animation over for approval from Richard, who is the awesome cleanup genius at Lab Zero. Approval usually takes about a day because Richard is getting deliverables from the outsources, who if you have seen the credits are way more than 20 ... So basically Richard is art directing 20+ people AND doing cleanup work himself, meaning he basically doesnt get to go home (so its great to have to listen to assholes here tell me that he needs to justify his $600 a week) I had the pleasure of meeting him a few months back and hes going gray already, haha.
So yeah, approval. While I wait for that to show up I get started on the next frame. Very rarely does the linework get approved on the first try. Usually something is inconsistent, a weapon looks weird or the shapes are a little flat. Depending on the damage you may have to do 20% percent of work or maybe even up to 50. Its important to get this stuff approved because otherwise you cant move on to shading and coloring, which are the next steps.
Once youre approved and do the shading and color pass (which take about 60% of the time it takes to ink) you send those off for approval as well, make some last minute touch ups due to feedback and THEN the animation is done on your end. Before it ends in the game proper, chances are Richard has fixed some things himself ... So Id say on average I could get about 60 ish frames of animation a week, and seeing how the character with the FEWEST amount of animations has about 1500 then you start to get an idea of how just one step of the process works.
THEN we look at Squigly. What a lot of you arent realizing is that she has MULTIPLE STANCES. What does that mean? TWICE THE ANIMATIONS.
Can you start to see how the hours pile up and have NOTHING to do with proper managing? A fighting game is unlike any other game. A character in a fighting game is the equivalent of a character + level design + the game design of any other game.
But hey yeah, lazy devs, right?
I don't think thats actually helping -__-By the way, in addition to all the other crap, Squigly requires TWO VA's: the girl and the snake.
Ok, so I have no idea about programming, game development and so on but just comparing to other businesses and projects I am puzzled how it can take 8*10*50=400 man-days excluding additional outsourced work (!!!) to make a character. I don't even doubt the cost but the assumed man-days seem astonishing to me.
I honestly had no interest in Skullgirls but this post is seriously making me want to buy it. Let me know when that PC port's coming out.
They love the game and want to do more work for it. Dedication, yo.
15 bucks an hour is the bare minimum they needed so, that's what they asked for. Considering the talent you need to do that work, 15 bucks is well undervaluing their skill sets.
Okay but... Let's say I as a consumer love the game they make and want to support them so they can make more of it. What in the world can I do? Spend fifteen freaking dollars and walk away? I personally don't think they're seeing nearly as much of a return as they deserve, and yet I feel like I can't do anything about itIt's a very competitive field full of people who love their work, which means that oftentimes people work for less than they should.