editableclips thanks for the link! Definitely some great material for intro videos for our games :)

jchamplain - hypocrite much? :) You seem to have a pretty selective memory about jumping all over jogogratispro. Ah, so now I understand the root of the problem, you're quite sensitive about people disagreeing with you. The whole time I though we were having a fun discussion, and in fact you were quite hurt.

In any case, I think we've hijacked this thread quite enough - if you feel the inclination to continue this chat, as I always love a vigorous debate, feel free to PM me directly, or alternatively start a new thread. If you do the latter, me so I can see your responses! :)

jchamplain - Ah still banging on about morality I see. :)

You're talking about straw man arguments, yet here you are suggesting that I'm immoral without admitting that morality is subjective (remember to look up wiki). Furthermore, in my opinion the use of sites such as freelancer.com don't constitute taking advantage of people. I'm really too lazy to keep repeating myself so you can re-read my posts if you like [insert here].

At this point I think we can agree to disagree here, I really couldn't care less about trying to convince you that you're wrong. But as this is an open forum, I think we all need to hold off trying to impose our own misguided, self righteous views on everyone else.

Bye! :)

That's very cool Angryfly. Do you have any 2D art?

Hey guys, I've been playing with the cloud compiler today, but it seems to keep loading for ages (20mins+) for a 1MB upload. I've stopped and restarted a few times. I guess from your comments it does work for you?

jchamplain - If idea of freelancer.com is causing you this much of a moral dilemma, I don't think you'd even want to consider entering the world of business (or even the corporate world) - this is but a mild example of what you think of as 'exploitation'. From your answer I don't think that is your objective anyway, so good luck with your pursuit of art/creativity :)

@EyeHawk No thanks. I understand economics. Morality also has a page on Wikipedia if you're interested.

jchamplain - I bet you haven't read either entry yourself friend :)

That's a whole different can of worms, but in a nutshell morality is NOT black and white - which is essentially what you're trying to imply here.

On the same vein by extrapolation your argument essentially is that all business is bad, since somewhere someone is being exploited. Perhaps you live in some kind idealist virtual commune, but those of us in the real world need money to live, and fuel our creative passions.

Here's another tidbit to think about: Whenever you start something new, e.g. a new profession, business, etc, ironically it is not all about the money, i.e. sometimes you need to do things for non-financial gains such as noteriety, goodwill, experience etc...

Those non-financial rewards will essentially lead to financial ones. So as a start-up company/artist/developer you can't afford to say "I'm getting shafted" just because you're not getting paid as much as Bioware for making my game/art/product right off the bat.

So my point is, freelancer.com and similar sites might appear to be exploiting artists, but the fact is, as the artists gain reputation for doing good jobs, they can then command higher and higher pay. Hence there will be a demand for the service they supply - simple economics. If you want to be successful, I'd strongly suggest studying these fundamentals before slamming others for being "immoral" or "unethical". :)

jchamplain, I think Kittewan has summarized it quite nicely for you, but if you need a more fundamental explanation perhaps look up "economics" in wikipedia.

— - it's tricky for me to give specifics, but as a hypothetical example lets say I wanted to make a space shoot em up and needed a sprite sheet like the following: http://opengameart.org/content/top-down-space-ships What would the ball park costs be from something like freelancer.com? I know the answer to this question could vary wildly, but it would be interesting to know if I'd be looking at 10s, 100s, 1000s of $$$ from other people's experience:)

By the way thanks for the vid on Rovio! I'd be interested to find out how they gauge the gaming ecosystem. It would be so awesome to have a business mentor like Peter Vesterbacker! I don't think anyone like that exists in a backwater like New Zealand unfortunately :(

You're not really doing an artist a favor by under paying them. The real reason people go to sites like freelancer.com is to find cheap labor. Artists have to under bid one another in order to be considered for the job. As a result they have to take on more projects to make up for the money they lost under bidding. Artists are over worked, over stressed, they don't get enough sleep, and they don't have time to produce quality work. They can't spend a lot of time on your project because they can't afford to. That's what I mean by unhealthy. It's not good for anyone.

It's also untrue that artists need paid work to build a nice portfolio. We can create art without it. Nearly all artists have work in their portfolio that they weren't paid to create.

jchamplain - Your argument doesn't make any sense. It's up to the artists to decide on whether or not they want to pick up jobs. If they feel they are getting underpaid then why would they be on freelancer.com or anything else to begin with?

A site like that simply gives them more options. If they're in a 3rd world country for instance, they probably don't have much choice in their local market, whereas on something like freelancer they'd have the globe within their reach. Additionally foreign currency may be worth more to them, due to exchange rates.

Thanks jwjb! I signed up just now. Let me know how you get on!

Until Scirra have the time to do something like that, you could take a look at http://clay.io/ who offer most of what you're after.

Hi Guys, so can anyone share their experiences from hiring an artist from freelancer.com, indiegamer.org, etc?

Also, Freelancer lists the rates and stuff, but I'm still not clear on how long it would take to draw stuff, and thus figure out very rough total costs. Can anyone give me an idea of money spent and the actual output?

wrroper - yeah it's been a fun experience overall, I think I'll definitely give it a go again. Oh hey I think Zak was asking about Bunkers for the space invaders part. You can do that really easily by just making the bunker out of little 5X5 px blocks, which get destroyed normally by bullets.