Every game designer I have talked with, all the articles online, and every book I have read on the subject say not to invest in art for a prototype game. “Publishers will strip the art anyway, it is a waste of money”. So why did I pay someone to do my character art?
Even from the earliest development of Swords for Hire I felt like the Characters were important. Before they had abilities or anything really mechanically to differentiate them I still thought it was important that players feel some sort of attachment to the characters. The theme of hiring mercenaries is core to the feel of the gameplay. That theme is greatly improved by having interesting and memorable characters.
In my first prototype I pulled art off of google images. This is what I had for my character art.
I committed to the medieval fantasy theme early because that is what interested me the most. I think the game would work well with a variety of themes. A Sci-Fi theme could be cool, but I was most drawn to fantasy. These characters reflected my mental image of what fantasy mercenaries look like.
All of my early playtesting was done with these google images. They worked great, I found people were in fact getting attached to these characters. Playtesters would assign personalities and motives to these characters without my prompting. That reinforced my belief that the characters were important and eventually led me to differentiate them more with unique abilities.
Eventually I reached the point where I wanted to start Playtesting more heavily online with strangers. For me this involved moving my assets to Tabletopia. As I started going through the process I worried about the ethical nature of using other artists’ work without their consent. Now that I was taking the game more public I wanted to make sure I was doing things by the book.I tried to find the artists to request their permission but my reverse google search didnt reveal anything useful. I considered trying to draw my own characters, I could manage some crude stick figures. I felt that have good looking character art was important to the playability of the game though. With that, I started to look online for an artist to commission.
I had been using Upwork a lot for other projects at the time so I posted a job there. I was hoping to get all my characters done for $100. I didnt know if that would be possible, but I got a surprising number of requests. I looked throught the previous work of the people that responded to my posting and found an artist whose style fit my vision. Jordyn (Linked below) did an amazing job. She was professional and got my characters done quickly. She was willing to rework when I provided feedback. Truly a pleasure to work with. In the end I got these beautiful characters that have been a lot of fun to playtest with.
In this case investing $100 on character art has seemed worth it. The characters are an integral part of the game and the art improves the playtesting experience. It makes the game more fun for my playtesters and makes it easier to get my game tested. And it was inexpensive enough that I will not feel bad when a publisher strips the art.
-Andrew Perrizo-Delacruz
Jordyn R – Artist