Rad, thats a lot to think about and more than enough to experiment with. I do believe tools are important, but content, good content at that, is just as important.
On that note, Theme. Any ideas?
Kinda depends on what you are into. You wanting something more jumping around with air blocking or something more on the ground and methodical? Also probably depends a bit on the art style you prefer to use imo. You get a larger selection of themes imo when going with a cartoony art style, but we can talk more about that over skype.
Personally i think the entire trick is to just create really interesting characters within whatever theme you use. Give each one personality with their movelist and animate them in a way that is enjoyable for the viewer.
Probably easier to do skype. I’ll throw you a message so we can exchange info.
If 3D modeling being expensive were true, SNK Playmore wouldn’t have ditched the models that they’ve made in both KOF XII & KOF XIII at all.
Those models were very time consuming & expensive for them which is why they went with 3D modeling for KOF XIV (& will most likely stick to that in the future). Same with other companies like Capcom/Dimps.
Hooray for artificially bloated budgets and fiscal irresponsibility.
Except that budget was under what some other devs were paying thanks to outsourcing (something a few devs actually noted during the campaign period).
Also, the team were quite upfront with the breakdown of their costs.
Take out the Indiegogo and reward stuff, and that’s still a &150,000 budget.
You’re working on your own game right? How about you break down your own costs
I 100% agree with the Skullgirls costs. Games are expensive, to think otherwise is naive.
After Xrd there’s no reason we can’t have it both ways.
Some of the costs seem a bit high, but I imagine that has to do with excess staffing and general business overhead. It definitely is in the right ballpark, but I have a feeling with a project of 1 character and $48k staffing costs not everyone is being kept busy which can be a problem during some sections of the development cycle. The costs are that high because it is a studio and you have salaries to pay and bills to pay to keep the lights on. $40k-60k is closer to what it takes to make the character everything else is ‘other stuff’ because it takes 1-2 months to finish this project. Then you have the certs and stuff so another $10k or so on top makes sense.
Only thing that makes me a little confused is ‘Hitboxes’ $2k. With the proper tooling 1 guy can do that shit in a day or 2 even with a 1000 frames of animation or so especially if he is getting paid a salary to do it 9 hours a day. Then have the QA guys just adjust it for balancing as they go so it shouldn’t be an additional cost per se and I would have expected it to be part of QA. The tooling should be simple enough anyone could learn how to do it in an hour or so at most (if not intuitive). Almost feel like that one is tacked on.
We can dream and Xrd proved it was possible, but even after spilling their secrets it takes a very specialized and skilled work force to do that. You can’t just take randoms from some 3D art school and expect to get those results.
I assume this involves not just drawing hitboxes, but actual tweaking and adjusting each of them per frame, which can be alot of work.
Also, with over 1000 frames per character, that’s still about $1.5 to $2 per frame.
Yeah, I know, I’m not doubting that it cost that much, rather I’m doubting that it was a necessary expense. I’m questioning what exactly they decided was a more important thing to spend their money on. Seems to me they were more interested in spending money on animation framecounts than they were in spending it on actual content for their game. If that fat sack Squigly could’ve been bothered just shed a scant few billion frames of animation, instead of being the bloated frame gobbler that she is, maybe they could’ve afforded a few more characters.
Or maybe because they actually wanted to do a well animated 2D fighter because they loved 2D animation.
In any case, even if they cut the animation down by half, they’re still spending nearly 6 figures per character.
Yeah, but that’s because they’re poor planners and wanted to go extravagant. There is no need to have eight people working on a single character, but they required it precisely because of their animation demands. In order to be economical you have to look for the simplest way to get something done, and their desire to show off made that impossible.
Lady, you can’t budget worth a damn. Also you really need to get that hydrocephalus problem checked out, or I don’t see you making it to your spinster cat lady years.
that depends. short projects are cheaper in 2D. you can get right to work with very little setup. 3D requires a shit ton of rigging and controls setup for the animators and is cheaper in very big projects because it will save time on rebuilding/animating assets. ultimately, if this is some kind of AAA game, then 3D is cheaper.
as far as what i personally prefer, nothing beats well done 2D animation. it’s more pleasing to the eye for me for some reason. super high quality 3D animation is awesome too but is much harder to get the bounce and squish feel of 2D. personally, i feel you can be just a little more dynamic in 2D with the animation itself while you can do much more with the camera and lighting in 3D.
8 people is their entire staff at Lab Zero. This is an actual development studio after all, not a couple of guys working out of their basement. These guys are working on the game full time, and even people who’s primary role is to run the company need to be budgeted for as well (even then, the only guy who’s job was more about running the company back then was their CEO, Peter Bartholow). If you think they can get the game done without having to pay their staff, then you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Okay, I didn’t know that their entire staff was just eight people, but that doesn’t change my point, if anything it reinforces it. Eight people working on a single character is way too many, ESPECIALLY if it’s a small team. That’s extremely inefficient. Why not have four people working on one character, and four working on another one? That’d still be really inefficient, but it’d already be way more productive than what they were actually doing.
Because each person has a unique job. At that time, Lab Zero consisted of
Mike Zaimont - Design Director
Alex Ahad - Creative/Art Director
Mariel Cartwright - Lead Animator
Richard Suh - Lead Clean-up Artist
Jonathan Kim - Senior Animator
Earl Gertwagen - Designer
Brian Jun - Clean-up Assistant / Associate Art Producer
Peter Bartholow - CEO / Producer
No everybody can do anybody else’s job. Animation isn’t just a simple process where one person draws every frame. Rather, it’s a slightly more complicated process, with Mariel and Jonathan working on some rough keyframes with Mike who tells the timing of a specific move/animation, before these are sent to clean up and then out to the contractors for in betweening. It’s more a production line if anything (which, if you think about it, is actually a more efficient process).
On a related note, anyone wanting to learn about animating (whether for a game one not) should watch the videos of the “animation bootcamp” streams that Lab Zero did for Indivisible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6axZW8gfRt8
This thread made me educated.
Uh, yes they can, and yes it is. There is absolutely no need to have that many people on one character. You’re seriously telling me that a person who animates is somehow incapable of designing and cleaning up characters as well? That’s complete bullshit. If they’re capable of animating but not capable of design/clean-up then how do they even know how to animate in the first place? That knowledge is REQUIRED to be an animator. Several of these jobs are completely redundant and should’ve gone to one person. They needlessly complicated what should’ve been a simple process. With their team layout you have two animators, two clean-up artists and one designer all working on the same character. Even if the workload was too much for one animator to be bothered to clean up, if they were being efficient about it, then that still would only necessitate one clean up artist. But they decided to have multiple instances of these jobs on the same character, because… why exactly? My best guess is that it’s because they wanted to boast about how each character in the game has 20,000 unique frames of animation. Again, their desire to show off resulted in an objectively inferior product. Characters don’t need that many frames of animation to look nice and move fluidly, Third Strike has beautiful animation and it only has 700-1200 unique animation frames per character. They’re nowhere near as bloated as the Skullgirls are. This further proves my point that they’re not making due with as little as they can and are artificially inflating their budget. Bad planning, redundant staff and a desire to show off all results in inefficiency no matter which way you slice it.
The other thing I wanted to touch on was the “other devs” that sounded off on how much it costs to make a fighting game character. What other devs said it cost this much? As far as I can tell there was only one, and it was Seth Killian. Are you kidding me? That guy wouldn’t know the first thing about making an indie fighting game on a shoestring budget, for god’s sake he worked on Street Fighter 4, a game by a AAA development studio that regularly spends millions of dollars on game development without so much as batting an eye. If he’s the only point of reference that these people had then it’s no wonder they’re in such bad shape.
To be fair redudant staff (the same thing I was saying was likely the high cost) is a side effect of being a studio. The studio has 2 options lay people off when they don’t need them or keep them around until they need them again and eat the cost. Indivisible has been on the table i think they said 2 years behind the scenes in some form so they have been thinking about it for awhile. When you were successful enough with your first project and you know another is coming it makes sense to keep those skilled in your workflow around.
I agree things were bloated, but it was for a reason. An indie studio with a shoestring budget doesn’t hire more people than they need. So comparing it to an existing studio that has additional overhead is an unfair comparison.
Even the animators of skullgirls said they had to many frames of animation in their first few characters and were cutting it by 30-50% per character in the newer ones just because the animation as good if not better. Some moves started with 40 frames of animation and ended up with like 20-22 in the final release. They likely had a really inexperienced team and it was a learning process. Now having that skill and experience for their next project they are in a good position to be much more efficient.