I'm getting ready to look for an artist for a game I'm doing in a very crunched time frame and I've never "outsourced" all the artwork for an app before. I've written out what I need but I have no idea if I've put in enough info. If you could, would you take a look at this: http://gamedevnation.com/horse-crazy-art-assets/ ...and let me know two things: 1. Is there enough info there for an artist to get cranking on it? 2. Is that too much stuff for someone to do in 2-3 weeks? Thank you SO much for any help you can give me! Jay
I would say you should at least add some basic scribbles and especialy provide and extensive library of sources to images , descriptions etc of all the things that are very theme specific.. Like the different saddles and stuff.. Its all very rough info you dont talkmuch about importan factors of the layout of things.. which are then important for asset sizes etc.. In general be as detailed as possible.. Because your on a tight shedule for whatever reasons you should get as much ping pong out of it as possible.. Whith that i mean basic communication on very simple stuff.. If you are so tight on time, maybe you should consider makng the art completly yourself including layout but in the optical uggliest way.. So just that you have your game scenes together and the artist can just jump in and exchange the placeholder art with better one. Cheers
Oh yeah, I should have thought of that. I actually have drawings on my whiteboard showing how I'm envisioning things (and as a side-effect, showing why I'm not doing the artwork myself). I'll add those pictures to the post. As far as placeholder art, I'm working on that -- I just hated to wait until it was all done before starting the search for an artist because of the time frame. Thanks for the suggestions. Jay [EDIT - Original page now shows photos of the whiteboard. Even with my bad art I think it makes it *much* better for the explanation. Thanks again, Mr. Ugly!]
anything is helpfull.. but so the artist know how you imagine things.. and the whiteboard quality is more than enough.. thats the reason you hire an artist afterall.. as for placeholder art.. well it just help having every sprite already there even ugly.. so you know exactly how much stuff is there todo.. this help alot in calculating down a timeframe for the work and speeds up the job alot faster because chance of "missing" something.. like "ahh fu_ck we need 3 more buttons and on this side a few gui elemnts are needed.. and the tail of the horse need to be animated in thoose 3 scenes ahh crap we forgot all this.. " usualy can be cut down to a minimum.. it always the fastest if the game is feature complete and you just need to "exchange" the gfx and make fine adjustments to the code.. also by that time your technical design is more or less finished so you know exactly how the art needs to look.. like thoose 50 sprites need an alpha chanel.. thoose 100 are used for sprite animation and should be put on on spritesheet etc. etc.
www.game-artist.net was one of the best places I found for getting a good artist for a reasonable price. I'd suggest posting a request there in their jobs forum.
Thanks for the link, BravadoWaffle, I'll check it out. After sleeping on it I've decided to cut down the scope for v1 just to make sure there's enough time. I'll save the Contest and Tack Store for a later update. That should give me a little more leeway in finding someone who can do the job in the tiny timeframe. Thanks for the advice. Jay
Just to give some closure, I found a guy who's going to handle the artwork for the game. Thanks again for the suggestions -- my next art spec document will be much better from the start. Jay
