I've been poking around to search for some discussions on this, it's clear a common suggestion is to hire a graphic designer. On upwork.com you post jobs for graphic designers or illustrators... Which am I looking for? What's the difference? How much should I pay for say a character with 2d animation of idle, move, death, and jump? How much should I pay for a tileset? Any suggestions? Comments? Corrections?
These are very good questions, and there are no right answer. From my experience I can say that it is hard to find good artist(designer/illustrator) The best way is to find several guys(you can post ads for both designers/illustrators) that you like Then give them test job to draw a character for you(or something that you can compare) Then test the result - evaluate yourself and ask your friends/family for opinion. Hire the best one to do all graphics for you. Regarding the costs it is hard to tell how much you will spend since price per animation will impacted from character difficulty(how hard is to animate the character) and how you want the animation to look. I have paid 3-5k for these games designs(hobbit and dream run is basically the same game) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.goldengames.dream.run https://itunes.apple.com/is/app/flappy-hobbit-jetpack-run/id595201824?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/is/app/hobbit-the-beggar/id568843093?mt=8 Decide yourself if that is much or not. I have used some parts of the game in my other games so that cuts down costs eventually. I hope that this helps
@heathclose I do my own graphics which might be good and might be also bad: The Good on Self Designing: Cost effective, very... Full custom, it is only your capabilities and imaginations and willingness to spend some time that holds you back It can be very flexible - You can change colors, the whole design, you can decide that your game that started as Tetris will be a Flappy Bird in the middle of development and then ends up as Crossy Roads by the time you finish it... The Bad: Time consuming, very... No, really! I am not a graphics designer, 'nough said... ...and these two makes it really difficult to take critics and drop everything and redo the whole thing from scratch These are the stuff: devCalc Pro: Not much to say about it, I have learned few basics with Gimp and customized TTF fonts. Still took significantly more time than just paying a designer. Goldie Gems: Can't even calculate the endless time needed to complete graphics. GIMP and Blender involved. At the end: Some people likes it, some says too old style which is probably true. Not sure what could have been the outcome if hired someone, I doubt I could use stock sprites for this.
@heathclose Last time i used a freelance site, they also had contests. You could put up 50-100.00 to design a character and the winner gets the cash - all managed by the site. That effectively lets you see multiple designs without paying for each of them (in theory) Be VERY specific about what you are looking for. And don't be too sad if nobody enters if the reward is too low.
