Is there a faster way to create charsets?

[Austintatious]

I need about 100 different characters for my 1 hour long game. Just making 12 of these has taken me about 10 hours in graphics gale.


Is there something I'm missing? I feel like I'm way below the average person in the art department. Is there a better program to use?

 

[Dalph]

Art is hard and takes time and effort, also depends about what you want to accomplish here.


Do you want to make them from scratch? If yes, that needs time, if they are just edits then the required time might be reduced by a decent amount.


I use Aseprite for sprites and general pixel-art work (I'm still an amateur but I'm getting there), it's pretty good.


http://www.aseprite.org/

 

[Euphony]

Spriting is time-consuming, whether you're using a special program or just good old MS Paint. Not much way of getting around it.


100 characters for a 1-hour game seems like a lot. I'm going to assume that most of those will be villagers, soldiers, shopkeepers, etc. If that's the case, you could just make base sprites (old man, young woman, child, etc) and vary them in ways like changing their clothing color or hairstyle. That would cut down on the workload tremendously.


Also keep in mind not all of them have to be animated to walk around. You can have people sitting down, leaning against buildings, etc.

 

[Austintatious]

I'm checking out the free version of asperite now. Thanks for the recommendation!


Even if I just vary the clothes it still takes so long... I'll try making more people sitting down. That's a good idea.

 

[Austintatious]

I have one more general question: how long should it take to make a 1 hour game?


I'm at 250 hours and I reckon I'll need 500 total to complete it at the rate I'm going. Is this normal? I'm doing all my own art and I already had a lot of experience with RPG Maker when I started.

 

[Andar]

Austintatious, please avoid double posting, as it is against the forum rules. You can review our forum rules here. Thank you.


If you want to add something and your own post is the last one, please edit it.

I'm at 250 hours and I reckon I'll need 500 total to complete it at the rate I'm going. Is this normal? I'm doing all my own art and I already had a lot of experience with RPG Maker when I started.

If you're doing your own art, then that is probably about correct.


As a general rule of tumb people say that you'll need a minimum of 100 hours development time for each hour of playtime, and that assumes that first you're using a lot of existing resources and second that the game is much longer than one hour (you have an overhead to set everything up that starts before the first play hour can be worked on, the later play hours usually get done faster).


But you might want to check game character hub (available for purchase through Degica on the main site webshop or on steam). That is a program that can generate random sprites in batches using any set of existing resources (several are available to choose from), and if one of the existing sets fit your art style it is a matter of seconds to generate 100 different sprites.


Of course they aren't as good as custom art, but you won't need custom art for every NPC in your game. And even if you generate 500 to delete the worst 400 results, and then modify them in your graphic program that will still be a lot faster than doing every sprite manually.

 

[Austintatious]

Maybe I can use something like game character hub for my next game. Does it let you import your own custom "components"? It could work if it let me do that but I can't find anything about that sort of capability on their website and I don't want to buy something before I know what it can do.

 

[Andar]

 Does it let you import your own custom "components"? It could work if it let me do that but I can't find anything about that sort of capability on their website and I don't want to buy something before I know what it can do.

Yes, you can - but that may be a lot of work to set up. Basically each of your own components needs to be an PNG formatted for your spritesheet-definition.


GCH can handle different spritesheet definitions (including your own custom ones), but each part for the generator has to be fitting to the definition template set.