Forums » Everything else » What sort of Sprites and Tile Sets would you purchase?

Hi,

I hope this is not considered as spam. I am just about to start adding content to my online store http://www.spritesheet.net The Sprite Sheet Shop.

The idea is to provide quality sprites and tile sets that can be used for professional and prototype games and keep the price down so that they are easily within budget for most indie developers.

In some cases I will have limited production sets which will obviously cost a little more.

Currently I only have a few sets online which will be linked to a couple of plugins I will post in the next few days but you are welcome to take a look.

Do you think this is a good idea? If so what sort of sprites and tile sets would you be most interested in purchasing? (Size / style etc.).

At the moment it’s going to be a little random until I can get some idea of what developers want.

In my opinion this depends on the target audience you are aiming for and I think you should define it for you. Do you want to go for high quality or do you want to provide sprites "for the masses"? I think that the latter could be more successful as very professional productions will most likely have their own artists for their assets.
But if you are aiming for low price sprite sheets this could work out for hobby-developers who dont want to mess around with the assets too much, but want to have nice looking graphics anyway. If one can buy these nice looking graphics for just a few dollars, this could be a good deal.

Anyway, it will be very important to have a huge selection, because I wouldnt sign up for a shop with only very limited offers when there are so many free assets out there I could use instead.

@Stuart
Personally, I don't think this could ever qualify as spam, given the quality of your average posts. Relevance to noise ratio is high with you so you're in the clear. :)

About your questions: I don't know about the others, but I'd rather design my own than buy someone else's, unless their work was exclusive to my project. I could also hire, or partner with a professional designer. Sorry if that's not what you were hoping for. Of course many people out there won't share my opinion, so stay put: more "votes" coming. :)

@UteEffacht.
I think initially is going to be aimed at the small indie / hobby developers where maybe they don’t have the time or necessary skills to create sprites. I agree with having a large selection and that’s going to take some time.

I know there are plenty of good free assets out on the web but personally I am never sure what’s legal to use as so many are just rips from published games or other sprite sets.


@alexandre
I totally agree with your comments, I think if you have the money or the skill to create the unique graphics for a game then you should (anti sales pitch).

Currently I am thinking of putting more effort into getting the cheaper sprites in the store and then creating more expensive limited sets say (2 – 10 copies max) and of course one off sheets for customers which will never see the shop door.

OTOH, here's an idea of a service I'd be interested in:

- a service whereby users in need of animated sequences would create key poses for each sequence, upload said poses and specify ideal sequence length, to someone offering in-betweening and sprite sheet export services at a set, reasonable price.

Reasonable is subjective. In my case, I'd consider 1$ per sequence to be reasonable. My (casual) project assets typically require between 5 and 50 sheets and I'd probably want to outsource 20% of those. IOW, vendor revenue would range from 1$ to 10$. Not a lot. May not be worth it unless you get one of those infinite monkeys in-a-box machines.

Food for thought... ;)

Sounds like a decent enough idea. Others sell other assets like music and sound effects... why not tilesets? I do agree with alexandre about wanting original graphics for a game though... and if its just for temp artwork there is a lot of free stuff out there already (http://opengameart.org/ comes to mind). Good point about what is free to use though.

As long as you maybe sell a tileset as an exclusive (first buyer has the option) as well as having a custom artwork option (so people can simply hire you to create a unique tileset) then having other basic tilesets for sale might still work. Prices would have to be very reasonable for non-exclusive.

Free tileset tuesday? ;)

Feel free to post your service under Resources at http://www.pointofimpactjs.com when you are ready. Best of luck.

Quote from alexandre
- a service whereby users in need of animated sequences would create key poses for each sequence, upload said poses and specify ideal sequence length, to someone offering in-betweening and sprite sheet export services at a set, reasonable price.

+1.

Tilesets/Char Sheets are much easier to create than animations. Most amateurs can knock out a decent tileset with a bit of effort... good animation takes a bit more skill.

Take a look at this site. Reiner is well known for his free art and he has tons of it. It is often packed with tools like TexturePacker or Zwoptex which makes it incompatible with Impact's simplistic (but perfectly elegant) way of using sprites.

I used a lot of his art in a community project. It was all free (we gave him credit of course).

So just be aware that if you are going to charge, your art had better be good, and available in different formats. But if you had what I needed, I would pay for it. I think you should have two pricing schemes:

1) anyone can buy it for a cheap/reasonable price

2) you pay more for exclusive "rights" and it is removed from your store, meaning it won't show up in someone else's game.

I know Reiner’s site very well and he provides some excellent free games assets as do a few other site all of which will be linked to from the shop.

I would like to thank everyone for their input I’m still unsure what direction to take with the sprite sheet shop! I’ll probably just try a few things out and see how it goes.

I think at least there seems to be a consensus that one off tile sheets and animations could be a good way to go.

I’m not that keen on filling in animation frames but on a side note I will be posting up a few tutorials in the shop about generating 2D animated characters fast which some may find interesting.

Thanks again Stuart.