Hey guys, I've been doing some research on this question but I'm not really understanding enough currently. I'm slowly working on an old-school style turn-based RPG (it's a 2D top-down style like final fantasy I-III), and I've been thinking of setting up a long-term contract with an artist where I commission him for different parts of the game's art as I work on it (mostly at his own discretion since I would be putting him out without a clearly defined time-frame). While I'm on it, is that a bad idea?

However, my main question resides on the creation of the game art. When it is being created, do you need to take into account that some of the assets will be animated, and does that affect how the art is made? Before I go any further, I really want to understand this. Forgive me if it's a stupid question, but I'm mostly at a loss on all this. I'm very much a beginner hobbyist.

On 3/17/2018 at 5:00 AM, ShiftyCake said:

Hey guys, I've been doing some research on this question but I'm not really understanding enough currently. I'm slowly working on an old-school style turn-based RPG (it's a 2D top-down style like final fantasy I-III), and I've been thinking of setting up a long-term contract with an artist where I commission him for different parts of the game's art as I work on it (mostly at his own discretion since I would be putting him out without a clearly defined time-frame). While I'm on it, is that a bad idea?

However, my main question resides on the creation of the game art. When it is being created, do you need to take into account that some of the assets will be animated, and does that affect how the art is made? Before I go any further, I really want to understand this. Forgive me if it's a stupid question, but I'm mostly at a loss on all this. I'm very much a beginner hobbyist.

To answer your first question, it depends... If you're both able to come to an agreement then it doesn't matter. The only draw back is that you might not be able to get the artist to go into "acceleration mode" if the pace of the project changes due to other commitments, and if the artist has more opportunities going on, they may drop you because of priorities.

Onto your second question, normally when I've worked with 2D Artists, they already had the ability to animate. If you're talking about Raster Art not Vector Art, then animating sprites requires redrawing so I would be more comfortable using the same artist who made the initial sprite to animate it. Yes you can indeed find another person to animate the sprite, but I personally have never had a separate person that takes other people's 2D art and animates it. (This only applies to 2D, not in the 3D world where animation isn't destructive to the model). Maybe someone else can chime in on this, but I personally have only worked with 2D game asset artists that could animate as well, otherwise I would pass.