How much is a good price for making a full RPG Maker character?

[stramin]

So, is $100 per character a reasonable price? (where a character includes 16 faces, walking and damaged character, sv battler and a picture bust).

 

[Tamina]

So, is $100 per character a reasonable price? (where a character includes 16 faces, walking and damaged character, sv battler and a picture bust).

If you are asking for personal opinions, here is mine.

IMO it's way too low, SV battler is 54 frames, walking+damaged character is 13 frames.

So that is 16+54+13+1=84 assets.

At $20 per hour salary, $100 budget = 5 work hour. I don't know if anyone can finish 84 assets in 5 hours

If you also need character design, there will be communication and iteration time too.

If I am from a country that $1 per hour is an acceptable hourly salary, I may take the job. If I am from anywhere that $15-$25 is the acceptable hourly salary, $100 is way too low.

You can try to find someone willing to undercut. But from my experience, undercutters rarely deliver acceptable quality result. You may ended up feel like you wasted your $100 because the result is lower than expected.

$100 per bust is a more acceptable commission price range for a low budget commercial game that costs $5-$10. Then it goes higher or lower from there depends on your final product price.

Or you can find alternative cheap options, like AI or pre-made assets, or let the engine generate it for you. I think those are better options for low budget games.

 

[Andar]

IMO it's way too low, SV battler is 54 frames, walking+damaged character is 13 frames.

So that is 16+54+13+1=84 assets.

With that calculation you assume that every asset is completely different.
But in the animation sequences any 3 frames are mostly identical with only small differences between the frames, so things are a lot of copy&paste

Additionally, there are countries where the local equivalent of 200$ is an average monthly family income, so an artist from thee can easily work much longer for a 100$ commission as that is half a month's pay for them.

I have commissioned many pictures for various projects over the last three decades (although none for computer games), always paying the artist asking price and usually getting things relatively cheap, especially if I ordered a dozen pieces from the same artist.
However you'll have to put in a number hours to look for and find an artist that is both affordable and of adequate quality. Those aren't usually the first to find.

 

[Tai_MT]

Buying game art is expensive

Hence the reason I urge EVERYONE to only buy your art "at the end" of your dev cycle. As in, your game is already done and all you're doing is swapping out graphics to make it presentable.

It's silly to buy all your art up front, especially if there's no guarantee you'll ever finish your game.

Buy it when your game is done. Save money up for that purpose through the entire dev cycle of building a finished game.

Then, shop prices for the things you want.

I don't think I've ever come across someone who commissions that wasn't open to the phrase "price negotiable". It is possible to haggle prices down with people in most cases. I doubt you'd convince anyone to do work for "half of what they normally charge", but a 10% reduction isn't usually too difficult to negotiate for.

People are people. Sometimes people are kind enough to work with the budget you have. Sometimes, people are just happy to have the work and to make SOME money. It just depends.

The big problem, however, isn't going to be how much you pay for art assets. It's going to be trying to get all your art assets to match the same aesthetic. Unless the person you commission can do pretty much all your artwork for you... be prepared to spend a lot of cash on mismatched assets and stuff you can't use, just to get the same aesthetic.

Otherwise, you end up with low polygonal sprites on top of matte paintings (a la FF7) and it looks grotesque and silly and slightly lazy and stupid.

 

[Ms Littlefish]

That’s very good advice @Tai_MT …truth be told, the game can be a series of squares, circles, dots, etc for an extraordinary amount of time.

Some people will spring for concept art at the beginning stages but I seriously cannot count how many times I’ve changed hair styles, outfits, etc and that’s JUST the characters. I can draw well enough to at least get my own character and location concepts down but I’m a musician and even my soundtrack is currently mostly a series of discombobulated piano “sketches” to convey melody and motif ideas.

 

[stramin]

I really appreciate all the points of view and aspects that I had not considered until now.

The game is 40% complete, and I am confident that I will finish it. I have been working on it non-stop for 4 years. However, I need assistance with the dialogues and the battle system. I am considering hiring people for these aspects, but I am concerned that they might not view the game as a serious project due to the default RTP. I would prefer to make a positive first impression.

 

[BubblegumPatty]

if I may say: Paying for better graphics just to impress collaborators seems a bit silly to me. If they can only be bothered putting effort in for a pretty game, That sounds pretty unreliable already.

If you wanna commission for assets , maybe to cut costs you can cut out extras you don't necessarily need?
Does every character need 16 faces if a set of 5-8 will do? Do they need a damaged sprite if There will never be a case where they will be damaged, or need those sprites for an animation? Do they need a SV battler if you're not positive you wanna use side view battles? Stuff like that.

If you decide later you do actually need those things, I can't see why you can't hire the person again.

 

[Andar]

I am considering hiring people for these aspects,

If you hire someone, then you're paying for their time - and if they're professionals it doesn't matter what the quality of the rest of the game is, especially since professionals know options like working with placeholders.

For dialogues, there are writers for hire out there, usually charging by word-count. Although most of the usual offers consider writing stories, not just dialogue for a game, so you'll have to check if that writer has experience with writing dialogue only and the prices might be higher because of the different workflow compared to storywriting.

And programmers (especially plugin programmers from this community) care even less about the rest of your game, only that you get them a very good description of what they have to program.

 

[Tamina]

I am considering hiring people for these aspects, but I am concerned that they might not view the game as a serious project due to the default RTP. I would prefer to make a positive first impression.

If you are hiring professionals and paying them, then you don't need to worry about first impression that much. Since they work for money and they'll get money regardless of the result, having a pretty looking game doesn't matter.

You only need to worry about first impression if you are using revenue share model, or preparing to run a Kickstarter event, or pitching to a publisher or investor for funding.

 

[saku_0015]

Artist here, $100 per character is perfectly fine as long you`re okay with the artist taking some shortcuts suchs as creating a base face and just changing the eyes, mouth, etc. to get different expressions

So, is $100 per character a reasonable price? (where a character includes 16 faces, walking and damaged character, sv battler and a picture bust).

 

[stramin]

cool, are you available for work? xD

 

[pawsplay]

You can maybe find someone for less, if you are patient, and have a good eye yourself, but... If you are taking about a fair price for the effort and skill involved, I'd say about $200.

 

[Skymin]

I've gotten answers like that before and it still just seems weird to me.

Like, I wouldn't call a landscaping company and offer them $300 to remove a tree from my property - I have no idea what it costs to remove a tree. If I say my budget is $300 and it actually costs $4,000 (which it does), I could fully expect them to laugh at me and hang up the phone.

I have neither gained nor learned anything.

When someone calls me and asks to play for their wedding, they don't tell me what their budget is - they ask me what I charge.

Maybe it was because my father needed a LOT of trees removed several years ago back when we lived in VT, but your $300 example was actually much closer to what it cost to remove trees completely (stump and all) for $1000. Ngl we would of actually laughed at any company that charges $4000 per tree as even without bulk charges, tree removals in most northeast states would still be about half that (and our guy even told us in his 30 years of experience that he knows a lot of friends that overcharge for tree removals knowing people who pay them aren't aware of how much it normally should cost.

Sorry, kinda tangent I know, but I had to constantly deal with landscape companies across several states and deal with tree removals due to carpenter ants.

Back on topic, Saying "$100 per character a reasonable price?" is hard to say as TC still never gave a full description I believe. An RTP style chibi sprite usually can cost you $10 to $25 + an extra $3-$5 for a downed matching sprite if you know who to ask/ where to look. Chibi RTP style battler without any special animations would also be around $25, with special animations, you're looking somewhere from $40- $50. Personally, I stick with Low for custom battlers which goes for even more than that as despite needing a lot, they really go a long way if you're making a more serious project.

16 faces personally seem overkill and I'd stick to 4 if this is your first project as I often see a lot of artists have a cheaper bundle option for 3+ expressions (including your default one of course), I personally use 8, but I have prior rpg maker experience plus set a small portion of my checks into the said project every other week to pace myself. If the topic creator isn't working, then I'd stick to just 4 and save a lot of money from the extra expressions.

Finally (before I run out of message space) image bust would probably range from $20 to $80 depending on quality and experience not including the extra expressions. The ideal is around $40 - $50 range as they produce high quality, but not overly detailed/ too realistic which suits most anime artstyles people often use in maker (including myself) imo. Helps to request "Thigh up" instead of "Full Body" and it mostly shows the entire character anyways, but at a slightly reduce cost which goes a long way.

 

[werzaque]

So, is $100 per character a reasonable price? (where a character includes 16 faces, walking and damaged character, sv battler and a picture bust).

It probably depends on how much a USD is worth in whichever country you happen to live, but personally I would feel extremely guilty if someone delivered:

16 faces
15 frames for an overworld sprite
10~12 unique frames for an sv battler
a picture bust

and I'd pay him only 100. The sv battler alone would easily be worth 100 per (human-sized) character.

 

[nbgamemaker]

depends on skill level' but i'd say maybe around 30-50 bucks or 100 if you're insanely good.

 

[Lionbarrel]

As one person working on this piece of art, I would charge much higher than the suggested $15 that I just saw as soon as I clicked this thread
not personally attacking you, I promise, I just saw that and wanted to use your comment as an example.
I wouldn't compare pricing yourself to a literal company that is expecting a whole bunch of people to buy it strictly because it comes from the company; I fall into that category of clownery, so do not mind me.

But as an individual, you need to price yourself higher because you don't have essentially a whole team behind you making this product, you only have yourself. If it's more of a custom kind and not you pulled out of your ass.
$20 doesn't go as far as they used to, and you got to think of yourself. If you produce quality content, people will be willing to spend more money on you. $50 is a safe number and that's if you want to do the bare minimum, the only time I would advertise to do any less than that number is if you were somehow going to make money on the production; like a YouTube channel that also has revenue coming in from you making a speed paint or tutorial with this commission in particular otherwise don't be ashamed to price yourself a little higher than like 70 or even 120 dollars.

Edit because good comment**

 

[werzaque]

Yes. I feel that 2D art in general is heavily underrated. This is probably the reason why we see so little animated sideview enemies on any of the stores. There's just a huge disconnect between the effort it takes to create a 10~20 frame sideview enemy (especially if it's pixel art) and what people are willing to pay for it.

 

[YeXin]

The battler alone could eat up most of the expenses so I don't think $100 would be enough. At least imo.

 

[werzaque]

The battler alone could eat up most of the expenses so I don't think $100 would be enough. At least imo.

Completely agree. Especially if it's pixel art (think Xenogears) it's just not doable to create a MV/MZ battler sprite sheet for a 100 even at three frames per motion.

Or, more precisely, it shouldn't be if you assume healthy hourly wages. Unless maybe it's on a purely funding basis and the artist retains the right to sell the same asset to others however they see fit.