Trying to elaborate a basic idea for a budget estimate

[le_lex]

Hi guys, what's up?

I don't know if this is the right session for this post, I'm still new to the forum and I apologize for any out of place posts.

Anyway, me and a friend are working on our first point and click adventure and we're trying to build a budget estimate for the visual part (background, characters sprite etc) but we have no idea of any value because we've never embarked on a project like this before. Can you help me with this? In principle, it would be a game with a retro look, in the style of Sierra in Space Quest IV.

Can any designer or illustrator tell me how much, more or less, the artwork for a project like this might cost?

Thank you very much!

[eri0o]

Not designer or illustrator but in general the things I see impacting price are

Compensation

• As a service (per asset): usually you can get a grasp from looking into service websites like Fiverr
• Hourly: the artist will sell a contract for some amount of hours or will bill you per hour, and as you monitor productivity you make decisions.
• RevShare: all of these depends on matching team experience but for RevShare if this is your first game you can probably only get a beginner artist, but if you were very experienced you could get some very experienced artist, but I would say avoid RevShare.

Additional things that affect the cost of an asset

• Is the asset exclusive for this game? Can the artist sell it in an asset package for others or not?
• Can the artist publish the asset in it's portfolio if the game isn't published?
• Copyright can always owned by the artist, check your country laws to see if it's your case
• Is the art the artist produces in an style you yourself knows how to edit and can produce good content? In other words, if you are just buying time, check if the artist is ok with you editing the asset too.
• If the artist is the only one who can edit, see how many changes you can ask on a finished asset
• Complexity and size usually will impact in the cost, in pixel art many artists have a price per amount of pixels!

Now you should have a good idea of scope of your game. How many rooms does your adventure has? Are they screen sized or are rooms that are bigger? How many characters does your game has? Do all of them need walk animations? What additional animations do you need? Does your game uses a portrait per character? Or do you want multiple for different expressions? Does the character has to move their mouths? Blink? How many inventory items?


Once you get a good idea of scope you can ask around these things or if you know the price per individual assets you can multiply or an artist may give you a lower price if you buy a fixed amount of hours per month to give them some "security". Anyway, just mentioning a few things I had to figure in the past.

[le_lex]

Oh nice, that helps a lot!
Thank you very much