As the title states I’m wondering if a $5400 USD investvent in concept art a good idea? The purposes for the art are for model creation and promotional art to get people interested in my work. This is for a prototype.
I asked for 10 characters. For each character the art I receive will be in full color, ¾ front view, ¾ back view, 2 head shots (except for an enemy soldier, which will instead have variations). Each will cost me $350 USD with the total there coming to $3500 USD.
Furthermore I asked for 5 environment pictures also in full color
2 of them are depicting action scenes
One is a firefight in the city while the other shows the party surviving in the wilderness and exploring the ruined world. These two are priced at 500USD.
3 other environments depict various static scenes (such as a city overview, the commercial district, and the city slums). These three are priced at 300USD.
The total for these comes to 1900USD
The total cost is 5400 USD, which comes to 6071CAN for me.
This is just art and this cost does not cover the other assets that will be required.
I’d like some opinions on this to see what the community thinks about this. Would you have any suggestions?
Is $5,400 of concept art the best way to move your project forward right now? Will you have plenty of money left over to complete your prototype, development, marketing pitches, and whatever else you have planned?
I.e. does it fit within your budget? If your answer is “I haven’t made a detailed budget” then you should probably go make one. Unless you have a lot of disposable income - if that’s the case there is no need for this thread.
15 concepts @ avg $360 each if done at the quality presented on the portfolio site is good.
What I would say is that if you are wary on spending that much money… do you actually Need all 15 concepts…
I can say from a project we did in the past where we had I think around 15-20 (cant remember exactly… was years ago) concepts put together @ >= the quality presented in the website.
Whilst at the time it was super awesome to see all this fantastic work come in… we probably realistically needed 30% of it
For a prototype - do you need 10 unique concepts presented 3/4 front back etc… are they for important characters? Are they to setup general rank and file models? can you get away with (and this worked for us well too) having a big block of nice thumbnaily/sketches (thumbnail concepts - Google Search)
This helped give as much if not more often than some of the final concepts…
Also - Promo wise, how far are you promoting the prototype? What are your plans for this? If you have that planned out then you should have a good indication about how much stuff you need as well
Think of it this way - what is the cheapest possible way you can fail? Because the quicker you fail, and the less you spend on it, the more you can experiment and find out what wont fail.
“Fail Fast” is a good approach, yeah, but all too often it’s talked about as if failure is an intent rather than an accepted byproduct. You shouldn’t be aiming to fail quickly. You should be aiming to do fast experiments. As a product of that, you should be willing to dump them as quickly as possible if they don’t show promise.
I know that’s probably what you’re driving at there, but your post reads to me like you’re pre-planning to drive things into the ground based on the notion that they were probably going to fail anyway. If that’s what’s going on in your head, are you positioning your stuff to have the best (minimum cost) chance of finding success?
It’s not really you. That’s how almost everyone talks about the “Fail Fast” approach. It’s even in the darn name. Instead of calling it “Experiment Quickly” they call it “Fail Fast”. Probably because it’s more unique and catchy and alliterative, despite setting people up to think about how to fail quickly rather than how to iteratively work towards success.
Not rich enough to blow 5400 USD in one shot.
I’m in the process of working on the prototype or atleast begining work on it. There is no project yet started in unity as I’m not super familiar with the tools just yet. I plan to get back home tonight and sit down with a tutorial for abit before going to play on Red Faction Guerilla.
While I realise that it would be my final call I would rather have some advice to back my decision. I’m slowly realising that I have less knowledge than what I would have perfered on the subject. So I’d like to gather the opionin of others, hence why I’m here.
Well you certainly hit the nail on the head with this one. Honestly my goal was to get people interested in the project, perhaps make it seem that I’m more than just an amature. I’m trying to make a game that could be AAA worthy, yet with the challenge of working with less resources than most companies have. Perhaps I might run into people with more experience who would take interest in my project and help me flesh it out to a greater degree.
Yes my answer is “I haven’t made a detailed budget”. The first time I even made one was for this concept art, which i had to shrink down when I saw that it was too expense for assests that wouldn’t be present at the begining of the game. I’ll definitely have to look into this though. Thank you for the suggestion
PS: I wish I had ALOT disposable income XD
Yes and I would agree with that!
The assests that I’ve listed down are neccessary to atleast generate some base interest in the project and visualize the first act of the game. The characters here are all important characters whom you meet at the begining of the story and carry that significance to the end, or near end. The action environments would visualize the game play while the static environments would help clarify the areas of interest to the story.
The 10 are important enough to warrant the attention they need. 6 show case the main party (in Act1). 3 are the main antagonists (one is more an anti hero), and the last is solider who will get multiple concepts for him. As for the 3/4 front back etc… I was trying to combine concept art that can be used to create models later and function as promo art in the game (because in my head i think it will save money). Not sure what a “setup general rank and file models” means but they are unique enough to warrant special attention.
That depends. Would the community even be interested in thumbnails and unfinished art? Not too sure ifthat’ll fly with potential investors or even attract people to the project. I’ll have to look into it. How did it work out for you guys?
As for promoting the prototype its my eventual plan to present the game to ether kickstarter for crow funding, or if neccessary perhaps a potential investor or company. I have an idea about what I would need, but again I’m simply asking for advice because I certainly don’t know everything.
I’m attempting to prototype a third person shooter RPG akin to the mass effect series/Red Faction Armageddon, but aspiring to some values held by older games such as the crucial story and gameplay elements presented in chrono trigger and final fantasy 6. That was a really good question!
Well the art was to address as to how the prototype was to present the game. Its got very similar gameplay to mass effect or Red Faction: Guerillia however a greater focus was to go toward the story as well as improvements to game mechanics. I certainly don’t want to to be just another cover shooter. I want to present TEK (lets call it sci fi magic) to the player and make it important. I want the mellee to be rewarding and yet punishing if used improperly. I want to potentially introduce the player an open wolrd that is story driven.
The art I’m trying to produce is trying to reflex my inner wishes and thoughts.
I guess for $5k you could buy every quality 3d pack on the AS and you would have some money left to spend on some other solutions, so I wouldn’t spent that kind of money on the concept art unless I would have like 100k budget.
It sounds like a pretty ambitious project. What’s your prior experience? I’m not asking that to be a jerk, I just don’t know what you might find useful to hear if I don’t know where you are.
For each character the art I receive will be in full color, ¾ front view, ¾ back view, 2 head shots (except for an enemy soldier, which will instead have variations)
¾ front view, ¾ back view
That is not acceptable for modelling. We’ve had that issue with concept artists in the past as that is fast work and not proper work.
We need at least full front, full back, full left side. If there are any poses, they should be specified.
There’s also an issue that’s going to rub the wrong way with 3d modellers and developers. If you are spending US$5k for concept art, how much more do you need to spend for AAA models and coding?
We have contracts for AAA quality models where customers are demanding for Substance + PBR along with UE4 shaders pre-set for them, or Unity 5 (beta) Metal PBR shaders pre-set for them.
The total cost is 5400 USD, which comes to 6071CAN for me.
You can hire 2 2D artists full-time for a whole month for 30+ concept artwork, and 2 3D modellers for the models after that.
