I’m slowly getting to the point in my game development where I’m almost finished with the game. Just a single normal level (there are 30 levels in total) and the 3rd boss. And then just unimportant little things. Now comes the unpleasant part, I have to hire someone to do the graphics of the hero and the enemies. And a few full frames for the story.
I now have to learn how to set up a company, how to tax it, how to check whether I can work with the graphic designer and formulate a contract, how to calculate the graphic designer’s fair share of the profits, how to protect my game with copyright.
If the graphic artist lives in an another country, this becomes even more complicated. I’m not interested in all this legal stuff, I just want to create my game. But I guess I have to go through it.
If someone have helpful hints or links or tutorials especially for Germany how to do this all, I’m thankfully.
I’m working on my game since October 23. I need a 2d artist, who make the grafic of the hero and 7 enemies and 3 bosses. How can I calculate the fair rev share? I made the programming, gamedesign, UI and leveldesign. Sounds, music and level enviroment grafic I have bought in Asset Store. I’m thinking about 15% to 20% of income. What do you think?
Finding the right people for game development is hard for everyone, including studios.
Finding quality 2D artists is even harder now with AI art flooding the internet and portfolios.
It’s hard to judge what you need without knowing the quality of the art you’re looking to hire.
Hiring a professional artist to quickly pump out high quality Unity 2D characters will likely cost $300-$2,000 per character.
This includes the following:
concept character design
game ready sprites of the character
Rigging and implementing character into engine
Animations?
feedback and iteration
Step 1 could potentially be done quickly and cheaply using AI tools like Midjourney. However, if you want to own the character designs then you would need to make sure the artist is not using AI to generate the characters. From my understanding currently in the US AI generated images using tools like Midjourney are not copyrightable?
As for profit sharing, it’s going to be very difficult finding professional artists to work for profit sharing (I assume that’s what you mean by rev share). You’re competing with other customers paying regular hourly wages.
As for how you would go on about finding artists who are willing to work with only profit-sharing/rev-share. I have no idea. Unity does have a “Non Commercial Collaboration” and “Commercial: Job Offering” forums. Perhaps that would be a good place to start?
Am assuming this is your very first game to be published.
Honestly I fear you need some starting capital. There’s about no chance to find someone to work on revenue share unless it is an actual friend who would not get in trouble if the game does not pan out.
To be blunt, since this is your first game, the probability that the gameplay & idea is outstanding, is very low. Therefore investing significant money does not seem smart. You should gather a few years of experience first.
Solution: Find assets in the asset store that fit!
Yes, that means you have no IP rights over these characters, but it allows you to publish a game at least at low cost. Note that trademark and copyright are different things.
If someone were to just rip your game, you have still the same legal options.
Don’t worry about IP this early. That only becomes relevant once you are big enough to actually sell merchandize and that is far far away.
If you do really want custom characters, have a look at “fiverr” and hire artists there. That needs likely more capital than using already made assets, but it is bearable for a hobby.
By the way, learning a bit about how to use graphic programs would be very helpful and is quite rewarding to be able to fix small things yourself and not having to go through 20 iterations with the artists just to get a specific detail right.
Those skills would also be useful when you use ready made assets. And they are absolutely essential if you are going the AI route.
Yeah I now some sides where I could find someone if I have luck. Here too I want make a post to find someone.
The point is, that the game is nearly to 90% finished. I need only one normal level and the 3rd boss to make. And some small details. But in everything I was successful and I’m sure, I can finish this game. So the point is, the grafic artist won’t have to wait to long to get the money from the game. I think I can finish completly the game in one another month (the small details) without the new grafic from the artist.
Yes it is my first game but I believe in my game so I want to release it. Before I made some levels and mods for some games for free.
Yeah I know the Asset store, I have bought there assets for 350€. All levelgrafics (enviroment), sounds and music I have from there. Some code too. But for my game I don’t find any good hero or enemy characters for my individual purpose.
Thank you very much for your link, this link is very helpful in my situation.
How much work it would take an artist to fill out 30 levels of platformer content
How difficult it will be to be successful with a platformer
As far as the art is concerned, I think it’s pretty fair to say that in terms of time spent on art vs. everything else, it’s at least 50/50 if not more. This is coming from someone who has learned to make fairly good 3D models, which are much easier in many ways that pixel art - for example it’s very easy to rig and animate a 3D character, far harder to create entire animation sheets for every action a pixel character is going to do. This means your artist is going to have to put a metric ton of work into your game, perhaps more hours than you spent programming it. And this means a lot of risk taken on their part if the game falls through or doesn’t pay off (besides probably not wanting to accept 10-20% rev share). Which leads to the next point.
Platformers are notorious for being very difficult to succeed with, mainly because they are the go-to genre for people starting off with game development. There are many more people who release one game, are disappointed with the experience or results, and never do it again than there are people who continue to make games and move into more complex genres. This means that Steam is front loaded with platformers, and it’s very very hard to stand out.
What marketing have you done so far for your game? According to How To Market A Game, as a rule of thumb you should have at least 5000 wishlists (if not more) to have a fair chance of Steam success at launch. And wishlists take a long time to build up. A lot of people like to say that game development is a gamble, but that’s at least one way you can get a pretty good forecast of what’s going to happen.
The way I see it, game development is best done as a bootstrapping affair, where you just wrangle things at the beginning, and hopefully far down the line you end up with a nice studio and several talented partners, contactors or employeers. First release a small game solo, in a timeframe of 3-6 months, with asset store content for everything you can’t do yourself, getting to know the whole pipeline - programming, art, audio, marketing, releasing on multiple platforms, taxes, customer support, etc etc. Use what you learned, and increase the scope and timeframe a little bit, and release another game. If you happen to make a bit of money from one of them, and you need to hire a contractor for a small job that will improve some part of the game, such as a soundtrack, do that, otherwise stick to buying what you need from some content store. As the proceeds get bigger, and you have enough money for hiring, you can then start considering partnerships with artists, contractors, etc from a position of knowing exactly what you are doing and being able to offer something of value (established success, a customer base, an in-depth understanding of all the pieces of game development, etc).
The artist have to make only the hero and 7 enemies and 3 bosses. Everything other like the whole enivroment-levelgrafics I have from Asset Store. The main work would be the hero character with looking in all 4 directions and this with idle, run and jump animation.
The 7 enemy all together have only ~50 frames together. The bosses grafic are already there, he just need only to change some details and make some animation. And 16 pictures for the story.
One another way could be like you said, that I get a 3D model with animation from the internet and make screenshots from the side view to get the 2D grafic.
I’m working nearly every day on this game since october 2023. It is hard for me to calculate the fair share with the grafic artist.
I would not recommend it. Daz 3d models are are recognizable. Basically it is like an RPGmaker sprite.
In general “profit share” is a big red flag which will indicate to many professional artists “stay away” and “there will be no money”. Some might still be interested, but there’s a high risk that you get amaterus or people trying to hijack your project.
Depending on your art style you might just learn to draw. There’s a reason why people use pixelart.
Looking at your thread, you have a sprite-based game, and this is within realm where you can produce content yourself. Don’t forget that you can setup a camera, film yourself move, then paint over it in pixelart editor. Youtube also had examples of people moving filmed for this purpose.
I can do some small work in a grafic programm and I did it in my game already. But completly to draw sprites I don’t have the talent. I made the whole coding, gamedesign, UI, selecting sounds and music from mulitple thousand files and all the 30 levels completly alone. With content from Asset Store and some help here in forum.
You are right with the profit share, but I have one good motivation, because I will finish my game completly before I will seek an artist. So I will release a video from the game and the artist can see my game completly and can realize the potenzial of the game. And there is no risk of not publishing the game and no big wait time for the publish date because everything is already finished, only the new grafics are needed to publish the game.
Look at pixelart tutorials. See how prince of persia animation was made. Drop some stuff in a pile, photograph it, use as a base for the shape of the boss.
Great. But this means you can also make remaining steps by yourself. Basically investigating daz and playing with its models can burn much more time than making the stuff in aseprite.
Do what suits you best. I have neither the skill nor the patience to do pixel art, but I can do pretty good 3D models, even though programming is very much my forte. If you’re better at pixel art, do that.
Some of those models you showed look good for a 2000s era game, have you tried making any stuff recently?
I think it’s worth spending some time learning a pipeline where you can crank out ‘good enough’ quality art so that in the beginning you aren’t relying on anyone but yourself. Find ways to buffer your weaknesses with some tools or processes that enable you to get 75% of the way there consistently.
For example, I can go into Blender and model something very fast, but I’m not good at all with texture painting. But, I’ve found a pipeline using Substance designer with baking and procedural nodes where I can make any hard surface model look good without any manual texturing at all. So I don’t need an artist for my games, even though there are a lot of artists out there who could make something that looks better.
This is an example of mine.
If you can model the thing at the top, you can create the one at the bottom with just a collection of nodes.
I suggest at least spending a couple of weeks trying out your skills in your chosen art style and seeing if you make progress fast enough that it seems feasible to continue, focusing on efficiency and automation as much as possible.
