Concept development.

[Howey]

Sorry if this doesn't belong here, honestly not 100% sure where it should go so feel free to move.

But I'm working on a new game (not a pet site) and I don't know the direction to go when it comes to art. The plot, we have. The concept, we have. The basic game framework, we have. But art assets we don't.

So my thoughts were to find artists interested in giving opinions and ideas for us to play around with. (This isn't free art or even their examples, this is honestly just "what do you think of this style?") My ideal pool of artists would be the group of this forum, since the styles are so varied and all of you play online games quite a bit. However that lead me down a concept of me playing favorites (you artists know who you are!)

My next thought was, a group anonymous chat. I would log IPs (just so if someone trolled I could block easily) but otherwise it'd be a chat room where everyone's name would be Anonymous #1, Anonymous #2. And essentially I would speak to pieces of the game and artists could give me feedback as to their opinion and what styles would work with what.

Do you think this would be a good plan? Do you think I could get enough artists in a chat room at one time for it work efficiently? Would any artist be interested in giving me their feedback on the idea and the style they think would be appropriate for it?

Any and all comments are appreciated.

[Gohawk]

[…] So my thoughts were to find artists interested in giving opinions and ideas for us to play around with. (This isn't free art or even their examples, this is honestly just "what do you think of this style?") My ideal pool of artists would be the group of this forum, since the styles are so varied and all of you play online games quite a bit.
[…]
Any and all comments are appreciated.

Is there going to be any form of payment? They would be giving valuable input, so I think there should be.

[Howey]

Is there going to be any form of payment? They would be giving valuable input, so I think there should be.

Nope, not at this time. I'm using this more as a brainstorming session then anything.
I agree it's valuable input, but I'd think the artist would benefit from this discussion as well to see what others think and how they come up with correlation to concepts.

[sunandshadow]

Nope, not at this time. I'm using this more as a brainstorming session then anything.
I agree it's valuable input, but I'd think the artist would benefit from this discussion as well to see what others think and how they come up with correlation to concepts.

Lol, if there's one thing artists already have opinions on, it's art styles. It's one of those "two people, three opinions" topics. For example I hate retro pixel art, but there are people who just adore it, and in both cases it's just a matter of personal taste. Art style is also largely unrelated to gameplay - Of the thousands of games I've played in my life, I can only think of about four where the art style chosen actually made the game more annoying to play, because it was either so low res/low poly it was hard to see what was being represented, or it was so hyper realistic that you couldn't identify the grid of the game to aim properly or figure out which stage of progress multi-stage objects were in.

In pragmatic terms, the art style of a low-budget game project is generally determined by who is available to hire, and of those who turns out to be productive and reliable.

[Howey]

@sunandshadow
Thanks for the insight but I'd like to continue with this thread to see what others think.

I'm a strong believer that while the story and gameplay help keep users interested the art brings them in and if the art style doesn't match the story well then users will lose interest. IE super technology plot that uses a style like PetRPG vs a style like Gaia.

[cameo]

Art is important to me. I don't play games with bad graphics. No matter what the plot is like. That said, interesting graphics don't savea sucky plot. I'd be happy to give some input.