Hell yeah

That's because it's awesome

~Sol

What the hey? We're still talking about making a game that looks like the screenshots that guy posted, right? So even if you'd do everything in 2d, even the character animation - for say, that Mario game he re-created, you'd _never_ need 200 people. I don't even know how you're calculating this. 200 people, dude? I think you're highly overestimating that artwork.

Look at this:

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/48398.html

Here we go. I'd be surprised if their team is larger than 30 people at best.

Like I said, it was probably an exaggeration... how many people it would take isn't really the point. I was just trying to say, that the man-power-hours for something like that, made in 2d, would be phenomenal compared to the same thing made in 3d. Regardless of whether it was 1 person or 1000 people.

I don't want to argue semantics, I was just trying to make a generalised point about an observation. There aren't really any games that look like that dudes drawings (style aside)... and even though that trailer you linked looks damn fine, it's sort of "cheating" in the fact they are using a bones system, which again drastically cuts down on production time since you don't have to draw every single frame. Bones in a way, are a lot like 3d... you draw the thing once, twice, maybe a third time if you are unlucky, and use the bones to effectively animate the character.

If you say 200 people is unrealistic, then fine I believe you... but why does it take feature length animations made "the old way" hundreds upon hundreds of people to make over a course of 5+ years? Because they didn't have 3d, and they didn't have "bones"... everything was hand painted... frame by frame... from scratch.

~Sol

Try to find artists now that are really good 2d artists that can design, paint and are good animators - good luck with that. The industry is always adapting to what's cool right now, to what's making money and 2d hasn't been hot for a long time now.

That's... pretty much what I was getting at.

The guy's art we are talking about was not made in 3D... I, for some weird reason, thought we were talking about painting 2D art, and making games that looked like said 2D art.

Of course 3D is far more common.... like I said, it is easier to animate and render images a 3D object, than to draw a 2D object from scratch for every single frame. And yes, if you did make a game that looked as good as those art-works, in 2D, painting them by hand... you WOULD need 200 people (perhaps an exaggeration, but you see the point I am trying to make?) to complete a large project.

Those 200 people could easily be reduced to 10 if using 3D... because after the model is made, boned, and weighted, you can pose it however you want, on any angle you like.... tween the movements, or whatever you wanna do... and BAM you have a fully animated mobile character that you have to do very minimal work to in order to make "the next animation frame" should you choose to render it to a raster image (IE Diablo 2).

Sorry, but I got a little confused when I presumed we were talking about the thread topic and it turns out we were talking about making the same thing in 3D?

~Sol

i think saying that it's not possible because that guy needed 50 hours to re-create an old game in terms of design using new digital tools is a cop-out.

I don't recall saying that it wasn't possible.

What I am getting at is, however, there are obviously large amounts of man hours involved in creating something that looks THAT slick. Even a higly accomplished artist would probably be surprised at how long it would take to render something of that quality... As you said, a good artist would take maybe a whole day to do something like that.

Let's assume there are 8 working hours in a day. To make a 30 frame "idle" animation for one character would take a week at least (discounting on the fact there would be no background etc if you were doing a character animation). So, unless you had a team of like 200 people who could all draw the "same" then making a 2d game with graphics like that would be unrealistic.

I am not saying beyond any stretch of the imagination, that it's not possible... just infeasible.

Why do game developers opt for 3d so much these days when a lot of times, 2d would work perfectly fine (and often give a better looking result IMO)?? Because it's EASIER to work with animations on multiple angles, and essentially you only have to draw/make the character one time, and the software does the rest of the "real work".

~Sol

If you want to make them "look" more gel-like, you could always check out some of Quazi's "Quazi-Blob(tm)" examples in the uploads and creations sections, or you can download my LAVA example made using Quazi's Quazi-Blob(tm) technology.

~Sol

Yeah, seen a few of this guys pics before... he's quite talented, but it apprantly takes him something like 50 hours to draw a single image... so it's no wonder games don't look as nice as those images

~Sol