Hello there, I am in the process of making a 60FPS 2.5d platformer game to run on windows and such. Currently my main character has 36.4k Tris and 29.5k Verts, and I’m wondering if this is too high for the game I wanna make, and if it is what would be a good count?
What’s acceptable depends on you only. If it works smoothly on the target platforms, it’s perfect. The way to find it out is by giving it a try. There will always be people who give you stupid numbers, but those numbers are usually created for one specific use case and your game will always be different and hence the numbers can’t be transferred.
You can find out what is acceptable by creating what you have in mind roughly. Put everything in that might be needed. Physics where needed, sounds, graphics. Everything that is relevant for the performance. Define a target platform on which the game is supposed to run and test it on that machine. Profile it and find out whether it is realistic to get it running like that with decent performance.
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Thank you for that info, I normally animate so I kinda add lots of polys but a game requires me to be more controlled with my load. A bit of trial and error should help me here, I appreciate the response 
It depends on a few things, among them what your target hardware is. For some frame of reference here is a huge list of characters from various games and their polycounts. Also consider how close the camera will be to your character. Consider how good Drake from Uncharted looks even very close up at around 30k triangles. 2.5D platformer game makes me think your characters won’t be that close to the camera, so having your character that high poly might be a waste both of your time from an authorship stand point, and of rendering resources considering you may not notice that detail.
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Besides the vertex and triangle num, hou many DrawCall do you use ?
DrawCall is much more sensitive for performance.
Well I’m using Unity 5 so I rely on the batches and setpass. Batches are 22, Setpass is 18…but thats just a rough test.
Ok, so I need to run a few tests to see how much I need to reduce, and thanks for the list
Also, would png be good for textures or would I need tga?
If you already have high poly mesh you can use them to some cut-scene when camera is close. 
At greater distances use low poly mesh.
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Its just preference. When decompressed at run-time all textures are the same. PNG is smaller on disk so it will help keep your project size down. TGA is a simpler codec so its faster to save and load but will be larger on disk. I use TGA because I like to review them in the engine frequently so I like the faster save time.
EDIT - note that as @Dantus said, the codec you use will not make a difference in your build size, just your project size. Sometimes its nice to have a small project for version control and such.
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For the final result, it doesn’t matter which original texture format you are using, because Unity will pick its own texture format and optimize it for the target platform. You may then pick whether it should be compressed or not with a bunch of different options.
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So I’ll keep the one I have for cutscenes and then reduce the polys on the gaming version. That makes sense, thank you.
So from what I gathered from everyone here and others sources, I’m gonna try to reduce my polys and use TGA because its said that PNG is kinda bad when it comes to alphas. Also I need to mention that I’m using 3ds Max and since I normally use bones or flex for hair movement would it be fine for unity if I add bones in long hair or does it have a feature for that.
Okay so I used the proOptimise modifier in max and max reduced my tris to 11,290 but in unity it says my tris are now 46k when before it was 36K. I don’t know what Unity is doing but as my tri count goes down unity’s goes up. I saw a few sites using ProOptimise for reduction.
Just a guess here. But sounds like it imported in both the original model and your lower poly model inside each other into unity.
Oh no, the only model in the 3dmax scene was the low poly one, no others were around during import, but I will say that I tested out a pit model from smash bros and its tri count was about 6,000 in max and about 20k or so in unity…its weird
Lights will add to the count in the scene view. You have to select the mesh itself in the Project view.
And make sure you’re applying the modifier properly on export.
I didn’t include lights in the scene, its empty except for the model itself and I’m pretty sure the modifiers are on good. I’ll test out a full scene later, Thanks for the reply 
Generally speaking, from all the stuff I’ve seen and in my somewhat limited experience as an artist, characters are 10-15k even in next-gen games such as Assassins Creed, including those with facial rigging. Some go way over but normal mapping takes care of fine detail, and the form is usually pretty standard. Unless you want to see things like muscle deformation, fluttering hair or wobbly bits there’s no reason to go much more than that.