Having decided to move away from pixel art, I returned to ConceptArt.org to search for higher-res artists. Although my preference was for a style resembling Alice’s, I was open to other interpretations. After all, the characters would have to take on more deformed proportions to properly fit the dimensions, so there was no point in disqualifying CG renders, sketch-animations, etc.

Warrior concept by Daniel Hansen.

The requirements for the job stayed about the same:

• 1 background, 1280×720, with some decorative objects that could be moved around.
• 1 “unit” type consisting of 4 different colour versions, with each version comprising 8 angles (3 of them simply flipped) and 4 animations per angle.
• 4 different enemy types, with 4 animations per enemy and one or two special animations.

I kept the $800 as the initial offer for this work. I was prepared to see this figure fluctuate based on the utilized style and its requirements, but I also thought it was good starting point.

As I found out prior to making my post, ads that pay more than $500 have their own section on ConceptArt and require a $50 fee to be posted. Since I previously had a positive experience with the site, I decided the price was worth it. Our IncubatorGames profile, though, listed us as a group, and I made the payment under my name, Radek Koncewicz. As a result, there was some confusion over the post and it didn’t initially go up, but the matter was quickly resolved after I contacted some of the forum administrators.

All in all, the ad generated about 50 responses.

Animation mockups by Jesus Garcia, Tom Garden, IMGNATION and Decebal Tache.

Now the thing with pixel artists is that most of them create tiles, objects, animations, etc., as a matter of course. However, with illustrators animations are much more of a specialty. Lots of submissions showcased amazing background and character work, but very few contained examples of animations. This had me a little concerned, so I decided to request some mock-ups. Not wanting to alienate any of the artists, I offered $20 each for a simple animation test. It wasn’t a lot, but it was better than nothing. From our point of view, it also quickly added another $120 that we had to spend (although one of the artists was nice enough to actually send the money back when we didn’t choose him).

This turned out to have been a very good idea. The results were varied in style and quality, and really helped to showcase each individual’s ability to interpret and produce based on our directions. I realize that extra mockup payments might not always be feasible, but I highly recommend this extra step if things seem uncertain.

In the end, we decided to go with IMGNATION, a Brazilian art studio that had worked on videogames in the past. They accepted the $800 fee, with the only “extra” being a request to be credited in the game (which I was going to do anyway for all the contractors involved).

The finished background. I ended up playing around with it in Photoshop to create the 7 different backgrounds we had in the demo.

The people at IMGNATION who worked on Tribes of Mexica were Marcus Severo de Moura, Rafael Batista Sarmento and Orlando Fonseca Jr., the studio’s project director. I only ever talked to Orlando, and initially he broke down the tasks as follows: background, 30% of the work, units, 20% of the work, and enemies, 50% of the work. Eventually the workload proved to be closer to: background, 20% of the work, units, 30% of the work, and enemies, 50% of the work.

Working with an actual studio meant that it was a bit harder to play things by the ear, but it also meant that — as a business — they’d work hard not to miss any deadlines. Gearing up for our own deadline, it was definitely nice not to have to worry about art deliverables being late.

The final background we received was great, and the animations were nice despite relying a lot on transformations (movement, scaling and rotations that are the staple of Flash “tween” animations). Granted IMGNATION was working on these animations while we were putting together a rough system to play them in the game, so things were not as optimized as they could have been. Hopefully this process will be improved in the future as we develop and fine-tune more tools.

With the core and concept art out of the way, we had all the vital components. However, there were still plenty of other visuals missing, which I’ll cover in the next entry.

Next Tribes of Mexica post.

Previous Tribes of Mexica post.

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