Games sometimes require animation on top of everything else.
once you get the base gameplay loop you can stop writing code moron
Depends on the game, it's not always that simple. Honestly if you're making a moderately complex indie game, it's a shitload of work. Programming is just part of it, you also need to create all the assets and playtest/polish everything. Not saying it's harder than animating a cartoon, they're both hard things to do well.
ngl Im happy i became a programmer first and artist second
if i can figure out a good enough gameplay loop, I can shit out a few artistic games for ze $$$
think naissance or lethal company (not that they are my metric for success here, i'm not a moron)
A lot of the code in games is made by ai these days. Being a code monkey is useless unless you're actually making something original and not derivative.
You reminded me of a convo I had with my dorm roommate. >be me >3rd year compsci student >making a simple game in unity as a group project >roommate sees me working on it >"why didn't you ask ChatGPT to make the game for you, anon?" >"that won't work because a game is too complex for it" >"but have you tried tho? you can't know it you didn't try at least." >fml
People these days really don’t seem to understand that learning a skill that’s been “automated” one way or another is still worth doing if you’re generally interested in it, it’s fricking annoying. Art, coding, even shit like cooking and sewing. Sometimes you just wants to learn shit because you want to learn shit, not fricking everything needs to be about the grind and shitting slop out fast via Amazon dropshipping or Fivver or whatever the frick.
I do and not just for gamedev, but it isn't some omnipotent tool that can make whatever I ask of it. The code it generates sometimes doesn't do what I want, does it in a way it is not fit for me (per example, uses a wrong design pattern) or is straight up faulty. Sometimes it even refuses to generate code if I ask it too complex of a task. So yeah, it would be nice if it could generate more complex things (it would make my job a lot easier), but realistically it is only good at explaining concepts and generating boilerplate, everything else is hit or miss (for now at least).
Yes because Chad thunder wiener from management is going to have simp Goldstien from accounting to check the code and put your stack overflow pasting ass on floor duty.
Programing can also be done with easy to acquire software, and half the time they can just steal code. It's easier done in much less time by fewer people.
Animation requires insanely expensive software. Loads of unique skill in not just knowing how to animate, but also timing, and getting the movements correct and looking normal. While also being much much more time consuming.
But since you think you are being clever and somehow not moronic. Hand drawn animation then requires massively expensive equipment like table cameras, peg boards so everything is drawn exactly right and it is not wobbly and all over the place, cells, paint, background art drawn separately on separate cells. An even different skill in timing charts to make sure that everything moves where it should and when correctly, and the whole crew needs to learn them and be able to read them.
Then waste much much more time painting individual cells by hand, then filming every single one of them by hand. Going back and reviewing the film for errors, and if there is one, retiming and re filming all of them again in order one by one.
It would save them tens of thousands to go get Toon Boom Harmony and a cintiq instead.
Blender is free and a drawing tablet is cheaper than a license for Gamestudio. Fricking jesus christ it isn't expensive to animate. You homosexuals also seem to forget that the frickint indie game studios also fricking animate!
5 months ago
Anonymous
The difference is i actually know how much it costs and you are a fricking moron trying to pretend you know things.
And everything you said is still wrong by the way.
5 months ago
Anonymous
Bullshit moron. You're making shit up and claiming anyone saying otherwise is the liar. Animating isn't expensive just because some of the tools are. And once again indie game studios require animations so it's not that fricking hard or expensive to animate.
5 months ago
Anonymous
Well that's only because. You. Are. Lying
5 months ago
Anonymous
>Game maker studio license
$99.99 >Cheap drawing tablet
$50
Now shut the frick up
5 months ago
Anonymous
>Numbers pulled out of your ass
How about showing me exactly where and what items one has to buy with links first or else you are still lying your ass off.
5 months ago
Anonymous
I'm curious what amazing animated stuff one can make on a shitty little 5x5" screenless aliexpress tablet. I'm sure all of it will be impeccable professional quality that will land them $$$ and gigs from every studio out there.
5 months ago
Anonymous
There are definitely big name artists that got started on a Bamboo but they inevitably upgrade to a screened tablet before they're at the level of getting on as animators somewhere. Hell, most of the newgrounds crew started on dumb tablets.
5 months ago
Anonymous
I think anon is pointing out that just you are a liar.
5 months ago
Anonymous
So, how does this work with the earlier pen and paper argument? What you are listing is still hundreds to a thousand dollars, on top of needing a computer to run it all. Not exactly pen and paper. It still requires specialized equipment and specialized talent.
5 months ago
Anonymous
>needing a computer to run it all.
That argument goes out the window when programming also requires a computer doesn't it?
5 months ago
Anonymous
okay so, not pen and paper is the only requirement?
Procreate Dreams is 20 bucks. The issue is that you have to draw a lot. A game, even one with a huge art focus like Hollow Knight or Cuphead, can reuse assets way more easily than animation can.
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Here's a professional animator making a three-second gif of Trevor from Castlevania doing a cool ship move. It's not colored and there's no background, and it took four hours.
I made this in C without any engine with Vulkan about 5 months just dicking around. Animation is way more time consuming for a single person
And if you want to do a complete 2D game there are a ton of engines and even coding one from scratch isn't too hard. The real time-consuming part is creating all those assets for your game rather than the coding.
It was far more popular when it was animated with actual shovelware by a few guys that were flying by the seam of their pants. The animation quality has frickall to do with it's success, and if anything is directly tied to it's death since the show is apparently so expensive they have to cancel it and beg for donations online now. But hey, at least it looks nice. Totally worth running the entire show into the ground over.
Writing code is difficult, but it takes less physical time to do.
If you know exactly what you want a program to do, it will probably take a few hours to write it all.
Even if you know exactly what you want your scene to look like, it will still take days to draw it.
>Writing code is difficult, but it takes less physical time to do.
Depends on how simple enough the language is to get a hold of it after some time. I mean, GML is much easier to grasp than say, C++ for instance, and even both are easier to get a grasp of in comparison to say, ASM.
Is less about the price and more about having a stable platform to grow
Indie game devs have platforms like Steam or Itch.io were they can publish their stuff and safely get a earn out of it.
Animators don't really have that safe bet, Youtube's algorithm hates every channel that doesn't upload consistenly and Newgrounds hasn't been relevant in a very long time.
He recently got cancelled for liking sexual drawings of underage anime girls. People twisted it into claims that he flat out watches child pornography.
I don't even know anymore man. I spent nearly 20 minutes trying to figure out what the frick was going on, because people from Twitter were spamming shitty memes and shitty jokes about the situation without being clear of the context.
I hate what the internet has become.
5 months ago
Anonymous
I remember part of the accusations being he draws his characters small and stumpy because he is a pedo catering to his fetish.
5 months ago
Anonymous
I didn't see that but I believe you. Others were calling him a pedophile and a child predator and other nonsense.
It just gets me depressed when so many people react this way over literally fricking nothing and make frivilous claims that can easily ruin someone's reputation and career.
5 months ago
Anonymous
I took a look last night and the guy has favorited art of "aged up minors" drawn by popular NG artists on his NG account. Who the frick cares and why are they going after him and not the artists who drew that art themselves? Newgrounds is basically a porn site.
I didn't see that but I believe you. Others were calling him a pedophile and a child predator and other nonsense.
It just gets me depressed when so many people react this way over literally fricking nothing and make frivilous claims that can easily ruin someone's reputation and career.
This is just what happens when the majority of your fanbase is probably 14-17 year olds. They don't understand NG is an adult website and FNF is an adult game that has a cutesy art style. They look up to any random homosexual programmer/artist/musician who's attached to a project like an idol and then are shocked to find out that adult men making drawings of cartoons like pornography of cartoon characters.
It's literally nothing and this shit will blow over in a few weeks.
5 months ago
Anonymous
If they had a problem with that art, why aren't they calling out the people who made the art in the first place as well?
Like everyone, I was a teenager once and I considered myself stupid, but me and everyone else I knew weren't this fricking insufferable 15 years ago. People say that teenagers are just being teenagers, but something has changed since then to make them even worse than I could've ever dreamed of.
5 months ago
Anonymous
>People say that teenagers are just being teenagers, but something has changed since then to make them even worse than I could've ever dreamed of.
it's always been like this anon, we just weren't as aware of it because the internet wasn't widespread yet
5 months ago
Anonymous
Things weren't like this back then because the internet wasn't the final frontier of society, that decides your future and how you'll live.
So why hasn't anyone tried hosting an itch.io equivalent for indie animations instead of relying on YouTube who will not only cuck them out of viewership but of payment too?
Web hosting servers are cheaper than ever these days. Get a few indie animators in on it and advertise it via word of mouth, take a small percentage for site hosting costs (far less than what YouTube would otherwise extort from content creators), and there we go. A good platform for animators and their animations.
Places like Newgrounds and Deviantart have way too much overlap; nobody goes to either of those to watch animations anymore. So a dedicated place would be ideal.
You could use itch or gumroad to upload a paid animation, the problem is no one would pay for a animation. With games it's expected with animation it's only expected if it's porn. hell you can't even give animations away. Let's say you make some Youtube alternative and it's free but only allow animations, if it somehow got many viewers you still need to pay for the bandwidth, with the same shitty ads that youtube uses. Maybe it would work if you needed a membership to view the animations, and it had porn animations as well, then you pay the animators by how much their content was viewed but still not going to give non-porn animators very much money.
https://i.imgur.com/otLExwA.jpg
Why is it so hard for indie animation to make money compared to indie games?
I think you are overestimating the sheer number of indie games being made, of course you will see more lottery winners if there are enough gamblers. Making a hit animation is harder than making a modestly successful game which can be more lucrative than most hit animations, from ad revenue alone.
>So why hasn't anyone tried hosting an itch.io equivalent for indie animations instead of relying on YouTube who will not only cuck them out of viewership but of payment too?
Because then how do you expose said site, and how do the animators profit without angering the general populace? Because even 5 dollars a month per animator will start to empty wallets too quick for most people.
Going back at this, it also has to do on how expensive animation tools are compared to indie dev tools
things like RPGMaker, Clickteam or Gamemaker are one time purchase 20 dollars, tops, or even open source engines, like Unity or UE
Animation tools like Harmony or Animate rely on a monthly paid subscription of 40 dollars, and the one time purchase is nearly on the 1000, sure, there's Blender, but that's CGI
anon you don't need high end animation tools to do 2d animation, there's tons of programs from krita to opentoonz that are free
even in more niche fields like stop motion the top-of-the-line software is dragonframe and that's only $300 for a perpetual license
Unity and UE are free until you reach a income threshold but are not open source. A GameMaker license is $99 and RPGMaker is around $70. As the other anon said Blender can do 2D as well and there are actual open source animation software's, which function just as well, as animation is more reliant on you own skill rather than experience with a particular tool or engine like game dev. A skilled animator could make a good animation in flash, krita, blender grease pencil or Toonboom, where as a good programmer would still need to learn each engine and the open source alternatives for game dev like Godot, can't even import .OBJ files and lack features that other game engines have had for a decade prior. Also unless you are making pixelshit, either one is going to require a drawing tablet.
The same reason why dishwashers in restaurants are some of the lowest paid positions in the field despite their importance.
They're at the bottom. Simple as.
Animators are the guys doing the actual labor. They are the guys actually installing the plumbing in the building, or laying down the tile. while the supervisor in the trailer outside makes double their salary, the next manager above them in the office downtown make triple that guy's salary, and the suit on the top floor makes that same amount in an afternoon.
Animators are the labor force that make the smallest amount in the process.
Game development. Even indie game development. Is expensive too.
The problem is not the budgets. It's the platforms and the broader consumer relationship towards the medium.
It's expensive because people need money to eat and pay rent.
It's not until you get into the workforce and have to pay bills that you also realize that 39k for a year's salary is pathetic unless you live in Methville, Alabama, to say nothing of the fact that self-employment taxes is sure to take at least a few thousand from you by year's end. Or even imagine that money is split up 3 ways, basically 3 measly part-time jobs.
You're basically paying so that someone can spend the productive hours during the day animating as opposed to working a day job and trying to muster enough energy to spend 2-3 hours max at night animating, if you don't pass out after work (or have to cook, take care of kids, etc.).
>It's not until you get into the workforce and have to pay bills that you also realize that 39k for a year's salary is pathetic unless you live in Methville, Alabama >TFW 20 dollars an hour 10 years ago was enough to live comfortably in a one bedroom in a nice area. >20 dollars an hour now means you're just barely getting by in a studio apartment or condo in a bad area and still need a part time job if you want to have fun >Most places don't even want to give 20 an hour and keep you around 17-18 tops, just out of reach. >Most college degrees are now worthless without nepotism to back them up
Living in a clown world.
>20 dollars an hour now means you're just barely getting by in a studio apartment or condo in a bad area and still need a part time job if you want to have fun
I have several New York friends that live in actual houses and can afford to pay for things and they make roughly 20-25 an hour from the jobs they have and they don't even have to work 12+ hours a day
The economy is fricked yes, but at this point I just think people on the whole just have moronic spending habits and don't know how to save money and don't want to admit that
>I have several New York friends that live in actual houses and can afford to pay for things and they make roughly 20-25 an hour from the jobs they have and they don't even have to work 12+ hours a day
And I assume all those friends are living in the same house, that's the only way you'd be able to afford that in New York at $20-$25 an hour.
$25 an hour on 40 hour work week comes out to $52,000 a year. After tax, that’s about 45,000. I think you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere in the city where you can comfortably live alone for much less than 2K a month, unless you’re living in deep Jersey city or past flushing. So at that point, you coughing up about half your income to rent. I’m not saying you can’t get by on the other $21,000 for all your non-rent expenses, but it’s no comfy existence.
5 months ago
Anonymous
Lots of people get by Warehouse work where the pay is even less unless if you work 60 hours
I got an offer to move to NYC a few weeks ago and they wanted to pay me $37,000/yr ($17/hr). I checked rent in the area and found that as a single person moving there alone I'd have $600/mo to cover all personal expenses, health insurance, car insurance, groceries, utilities, etc. Absolutely no chance of ever doing something other than renting.
NYC is unlivable unless you are pulling in at the very least $65K and that is not well.
Also you won't have that car with insurance either. No building has space to park it and parking spaces in the city go around $200-$400 a month, and driving is a fricking nightmare.
>NYC is unlivable unless you are pulling in at the very least $65K and that is not well.
as someone who actually lives there, no that's not true at all
Obviously if you wanna live on the Upper East side or Midtown yes that shit is expensive but you can still afford a decent place by yourself as long as you're not moronic with your money
Billionaires have rights too, libby. Just because you chose to spend your youth smoking pot and playing videogames doesn't mean he deserves to have his money stolen.
Anyone who makes something for someone else has to have an ego, because at some point you say "I'm good enough that other people will clearly enjoy looking at my work."
An artist that scribbles for themselves only is humble but no one even knows they exist. Which is fine, but I think anons don't really understand motivation or psychology very much.
How does it cost that much for a single second of animation? Especially if he's doing most of it himself?
He's probably just basing it off of a standard industry rate/how much salary he'd like to be making.
anon 1 second of animation is 12 drawings if you are animating in 2s let's say 6 drawings if you are doing something really cheap, are you even able to make a sketch in an hour anon? Moreover they are freelancers, thus taxes and is an high skill job. Remember that a plumber could charge you 100$ an hour just to check some pipes
again, that's why you don't do full animation
sure, animating on twos means twelve drawings a second - but who said you had to draw the whole character again for each of those drawings?
Let's see >Animation is more niche in the west compared to games >The payment process for indie games are fundamentally more beneficial than animation >Ad based Payment < Direct Pay >Youtube cut > Steam's Cut
People are still more likely to play a game that takes a lot from cartoon than actually watch them. The gaming community is just much more strong than the general animation community. The size of both are just not comparable.
I'd be more sympathetic to Zeurel but I remember watching one of his streams shortly after he did some clout chasing animation for a youtuber and he was complaining that people didn't care about his works until he did the clout chasing thing.
Like why would to make something to get people's attention then b***h at them for not watching his stuff before? Strange man.
I can understand it a bit. You make a small animation for a streamer you like and get a big fountain of praise and likes which makes you feel popular and gives you the false assumption that when you make a project which requires so much time and effort, people would want to watch that too.
Monkey Wrench has always been a bit eh. Its obviously Zeu's passion project and its clear there is a small group of people who enjoy it too, but when he sees how many people like his dumb Joel animation compared to his thing, I can assume he gets a bit jealous.
some guy can make a game by themselves in 3 months a indie animator can only make a 30 second video in same amount of time, basically it's not the same fricking thing mate so the comparison is ridiculous
To play a indie game you have to buy it (in before someone says piracy like an unfunny newbie) so you can easily price your game based on how much you generally spent making it and other such economic factors and despite everything people accept this form of payment.
Meanwhile indie animation just puts it on YouTube for free. There isn't a way to montinize videos really outside of merch and patreon subs, and trying to do something like charge a ticket fee to watch ends up getting a ton of backlash because for some reason people expect videos to be free and to get their money from ads.
You know who many people buy shit tons of games in every steam sale and then never play them. You can buy a indie game and never play it and the creator will get your money anyways.
How to make money with a video game: > make something > people buy it
How to make money with animation: > make something > people watch it for free > some corporate gangbang of advertisers, ad networks, and YouTube eventually give you money for ads they watched while watching your thing. > it's not enough money to wipe your ass > beg for funding from people who already got what they wanted for the promise of getting another thing via Patreon or Kickstarter > repeat for every episode of your thing
/thread. The time investment is pretty much equivalent, but games at least have the chance to make beyond ROI and you only need to get over the hurdle of getting it on shelves or a storefront.
Animation, movies and TV are all much easier to access, but you’re way more dependent on the teat of advertisers and distributors to get it really seen by people who matter and who can give your project money beyond crowdfunding.
>music and sound design >$11,000
What the frick? You can get music for cheap from smalltime SoundCloud gays and you can do sound design yourself if you just took a couple hours to learn audacity
I don't know, it's always been intuitive for me. The only thing I had to learn was audacity and similar software. Sound design is various sfx of items, background ambience, sounds getting louder as they approach, quieter far away, music swelling or fading out or pausing, footsteps, echoes, crunching leaves, futuristic beeps and buzzes, whatever. Just think about what sounds things make homie then think what environment they're in and whether they got reverb or are muffled or whatever. You can do it yourself easily layering royalty free audio clips on youtube. Or pay for a big sfx pack they're not expensive
The FCC has radio and television by the throat. If they had known how big the internet was going to be you know damn well they'd have neutered it when they had the chance.
The problem is that so many indie projects go all out with the animation and other stuff when they don't need to.
I get he has standards, but the animation doesn't need to be as fluid as it is. You could have a stronger emphasis on keyframes which would also cut down on the animatic costs. Lower the frame rate. Music doesn't need to be playing at every scene and he may have even overpaid the voice actors. Reuse background shots more and lower the amount of camera angles used.
He needs to be smarter with his money, and he can still get the kind of story told that he wants. After all, this is INDIE animation, not something backed by a large studio.
Unpopular opinion but 24fps looks better for animation. The lack of frames forces you to get creative with how you depict your motion between them. Super fluid motion is a meme and one reason I don't like mainstream cgi as much as 2d. Borrow from what anime does and use more stills with minimal animation in them between the action segments. It's a huge money saver along with dialogue over some panning shots of the setting. A lot of animators learn a certain way of animating that might look stylish but it's not feasible in a big project. Even with all the money anime makes they still can't recreate the same level of animation that 90's OVAs used. Not a realistic standard.
Super fluid is fun imo but it's completely unnecessary for anything but theatrical movies. And it's not the only way as you said, to get animation looking nice or effective.
I get it's his passion project but he's clearly getting upset at how much money it's taking to get episodes done. He can reach a compromise that most people would be happy with and still tell the stories he wants. >Is producing a pilot with half the run time.
I agree, looks like a case of stubborn creator. Many such cases. I can only understand it if theres already success to maintain, but there's just not yet
I get your point, but the first sentence confused me. I think you meant to say 12fps is better for animation. Most everything, CGI included, is animated at 24 fps. It's only video games that get animated at 30/60 fps.
I will point out that a lot of animators add a lot of unnecessary fluidity because they want to add it to their portfolios. In the hopes of getting hired by a larger studio. Someone like Zuerel should really reel it back though, he's already proven himself capable of working for a studio.
Animation has always been hard to monetize even for big studios.
But keep in mind most indie games don't make money either. 10,000 are released every year on steam alone and maybe 100 will make a profit.
Annoyingly so, animation does poorly based on everyone just viewing it as meaningless kiddy shit.
Advertisers do not want to bother paying for ad space against meaningless kiddy shit
Licensees do not want to attach their name to meaningless kiddy shit
Studios don't want to waste time and money on churning out meaningless kiddy shit
Everyone in any upper tier space that has the money, clout, and makes the decisions only wants their names attached to the super serious, hard-hitting drama, over the top action, big tent big titles and mega hits. Their personal opinion and personal bias comes into play. Which is why we have guys at the top saying things like >Why make more kiddy shit when we can make LIVE ACTION Little Mermaid and Lion King for REAL Adults who frick!
You forgot the people who have the job of giving opinions on media, critics. They fricking loathe animation and also view it as dumb kid shit not worth their time.
Studios, executives, and advertisers do not want to put their money to something that will be panned by critics who will tel all audiences it is pure shit due to the fact that the animated movie is not Citizen Kane.
That's silly. Kids stuff is incredibly profitable due to toy sales. Power Rangers, Paw Patrol , Peppa Pig, Transformers... Disney built there empire in the 90s ON merch.
Toy sales declining due to internet stuff is a recent thing
Toy companies shifted who their target demographic is. Now all the toy based shows are preschool tier. Almost every preschool show had huge merch deals and whole aisles in toy sections of stores. Then there is that 6-15 gap where there is little except for the latest movie tie-ins at best and then it;s adult collectors stuff. They decided elementary and middle school age kids buy video games so they quit bothering and went for the younger kids and older collectors.
It's also why the toy section in Target is largely 80s MOTU, old TMNT, transformers, and other major 80s franchises rebooted or the 80s series remade and put back on shelves.
It is not something you can do a little bit here and there for an hour or two at night or in your spare time. It's doing 10 or more hours in one day and that still only amounts to tiny minuscule elements of what you need made. Someone has to just outright dedicate full time effort to it if they want anything done in 6 months or less. So it basically has to be their job, not a side gig. Animators need to make animating into their sole source of income. If they are not getting paid to make it then they simply cannot make it.
Like others said, animation can be expensive and time consuming.
Which is fine if you are rich or have resources.
But if you don’t, then you have to make a product that people actually want. To watch on repeat, donate money, and buy plushies.
And Monkey Wrench is not something people want.
Creating your passion project is impressive and deserves some respect, but if your passion project is something no one likes then you should be ready to have to pay big time.
The psychology of the consumer varies from each type of media. People have been trained since cable TV to watch cartoons for free and youtube does the same. The only model that seems to work is to hope merch sales and patron donations will cover costs. Most people will just watch it for free and the pennies they make from adds will not make it worth it unless they are getting 10s of millions of views per episode. Meanwhile with games each person who consumes the product paid for it. People are used to paying for video games not so much with animated cartoons. You would have a better chance at getting someone to pay for a comic instead of an animated video. It's kind of fricked up but that's how it goes.
As a consumer I like free things, but the industry would probably be healthier if people actually paid for the entertainment they watched. Even a dollar might go a long way to making more of this stuff profitable.
The internet basically crumbled the entire video media landscape. We're in an inbetween period where everyone is still trying to figure out how to stabilize the profitability of internet media. I can see the future being essentially all patreon style online. Especially if twitter decides to become its own payment processor.
It's undermerchandized. If you can't even throw up a link to flog shirts you don't deserve to make money. You need to prostitute out your characters on as much merch as you can.
Because with animation you don’t have to buy the fricking product lmao. It’s all supposed to be free and paid for by some company’s commercials. What a bad spot for creators to be in
You really just need one thing for a good video game.
Gameplay.
Call it fun, call it engaging, call it impactful, whatever. You just need the gameplay to be good. Everything else can be shit. Take a look at Undertale, it sold hundreds of thousands and (objectively) looks terrible. Minecraft sold millions and looks/sounds like shit. But the core game is something that people enjoy playing, so they'll gladly shell out $10 for it.
Combine that with 10,000 sales and you have yourself a nice income, even after half of it disappears from storefront fees and taxes and such. One person could do well from that, and a team of three could do okay.
What do you need for a good animation? You need good design, good actual drawing, good animation between frames, good audio/sound, and good VAs. All those cost money and people. And you can rarely skimp out on them either; while you COULD get away with some being shit, you'd really need the other parts to be excellent for anyone to pay attention. Already your indie animation project is at double the people required for an indie video game project.
And unless everybody is fine with working for free, you kind of need funding up-front. A solo programmer could work on a video game in their free time, a solo animator can't exactly do the same if you want stuff like lipsync or storyboarding to be handled by someone else. Also, there's how pricing is handled. Most people expect to pay $10 to get a video game in exchange. Most people aren't going to spend $10 to get a 20-minute animated video, which means you want your funding up front. And it's harder to ask people for money for some future planned project instead of a current completed one.
In the case of both Undertale and Minecraft, their creators already had good enough connections within the communities they were in that helped prop up their games even higher than what attention the average indie game would usually get (in that period).
Cartoon: bad animation/characters/writing = bad show.
Game: bad animation/characters/writing can still be good if the gameplay is fun.
As this anon said
It's expensive because people need money to eat and pay rent.
It's not until you get into the workforce and have to pay bills that you also realize that 39k for a year's salary is pathetic unless you live in Methville, Alabama, to say nothing of the fact that self-employment taxes is sure to take at least a few thousand from you by year's end. Or even imagine that money is split up 3 ways, basically 3 measly part-time jobs.
You're basically paying so that someone can spend the productive hours during the day animating as opposed to working a day job and trying to muster enough energy to spend 2-3 hours max at night animating, if you don't pass out after work (or have to cook, take care of kids, etc.).
Use 3D models. Once they're made and rigged you can use them for fluid and very cheap animation.
some guy can make a game by themselves in 3 months a indie animator can only make a 30 second video in same amount of time, basically it's not the same fricking thing mate so the comparison is ridiculous
Why can't you just record the game and make it into a cartoon?
>Game: bad animation/characters/writing can still be good if the gameplay is fun.
Depends on the genre. I'd be more scrutinous about the writing and/or characters if it were a more story-driven type like an RPG or an adventure game.
I went into Destiny 1 completely blind. Liked the gameplay and was confused why everyone was online crying about, "muh story, why is there a big golfball and why are we fighting aliens?"
Games are bought for 5 to 20 dollars per sale, animations aren't paid for 99% of the time. Instead they are just put out for free, and must either get enough millions of views to become profitable through ads or inspire enough people to willingly donate money to the artist.
This means that an animator must be really popular to get any real amount of money from his work, where as a game dev will get money even if they only sell 200 copies
Its funny how some "critics" say that some old cartoons are "glorified toy commercials", but no shit that's how they make money so that shit like OP doesn't happen.
I think the biggest issue is that indie animators have no platform to go to without getting fricked over (IE forced to give up the rights to their creation). Indie games can reliably get on Steam pretty easily without the devs getting a raw deal, with one such title, Lethal Company, being able to outsell the new Call of Duty when it came out to boot.
well I did say you still have to make it appealing anon. Though I don't like flash in general, fosters home looks much more appealing than johnny test despite using flash, and you can still make good hand drawn animation with lesser frame count if you're smart.
Do people really hate rigging? I think it can look really good (Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure, Hilda and Wander over Yonder) were all done by the same studio and it looks incredible. I would have t thought rigged animation could be a benefit to those who don’t want to shell out $80k for hand drawn animation for every single episode after.
Yes. Because it limits what you can really do artistically. Eventually people catch on that every cartoon they watch is shot from eye level because you can't move orbitally around a 2d puppet. Many studios have started integrating a mix of rigs and hand drawn because rigs alone just suck. It's one reason everyone flocks to anime. As they take great pride in interesting and engaging shot composition and "camera" work. But that shit costs a frickton
Indie games often can't do those interesting angles because of how they work (2d sprites usually) but people don't mind it.
Also, shows like TV sitcoms have limitations like always filming the set from the same angles and people still watch them without problem.
Yet again, why do animation fans care so much?
5 months ago
Anonymous
People don't mind sprites because of the interactivity aspect. If you had no control over the sprite and just had to sit and watch it, nobody would.
As for sitcoms, comedy always sells in any form. A laugh outweighs people's visual interest. We're not talking comedy when I say "people hate rigging."
Comedy makes you laugh
Videos games let you decide the fate of the character
Animation outside of these things needs visual stimulation to succeed
>Many studios have started integrating a mix of rigs and hand drawn because rigs alone just suck
i thought that was always how it was done?
5 months ago
Anonymous
I mean they hand draw the rigs I guess, before asset dropping them into a background layer. But I mean frame by frame. What part of Johnny Test was hand drawn frame by frame? The mid 00's flash shit was garbage from a toilet bad
5 months ago
Anonymous
>What part of Johnny Test was hand drawn frame by frame?
The first season, which was produced in the US.
[...]
Maybe I'm dumb, but if you asked me, I would guess most animated shows these days have rigs and don't hand draw all their animation. A lot of shows look sort of basic to be hand drawn, and I don't mean the art style, but the movement itself.
Am I way off here? How do I learn more to distinguish differences?
Half of most 2D shows are hand-drawn in Korea, which has been the case for decades.
5 months ago
Anonymous
steven universe is all hand-drawn
i think gumball is tweened
iirc gravity falls and star vs are hand-drawn
That's interesting.
So if it's all hand drawn, does that mean there are no rigs whatsoever?
Also I posted those shows but they were just an example, I'd guess the same about Amphibia, Owl house, Hilda etc. But again, I'm probably off.
If these are all hand drawn, then how come the animation itself looks so basic and sort of stiff? Earlier hand drawn game trailers got mentioned, when I watch them they flow much better and seem to have more weight behind movement. I get it's different when you're animating 22 minute episodes, but how come all these shows look and move so similarly if they're all hand drawn?. I rarely feel impressed by animation in 2D shows.
I'm not trying to shit talk them, I'm genuinely curious here
>in Korea
wait what? Then what do the western 2D animation studios do.
5 months ago
Anonymous
>then how come the animation itself looks so basic and sort of stiff?
because it's cheap >Then what do the western 2D animation studios do
commercials mainly if you're talking about studios that actually do the animation
5 months ago
Anonymous
>because it's cheap
Huh. So then is it sort of a given that all 2D animated shows are doomed to have shit animation?
If the shows are hand drawn, which as far as I'm aware takes a lot of time and effort as it is, then how come they don't "look" it? Compared to something like Tom & Jerry which I know is hand drawn and in my head, is how hand drawn animation looks, it's night and day, right?
>commercials mainly if you're talking about studios that actually do the animation
What do all the animation students do once they leave college? What does CN do? Surely they don't just outsource everything to cheap labour countries?
The main thing is the tweening, that fluid motion between pose 1 and pose 2. Rigs don't warp or morph, none of their body segments change size (unless the size changing is the point.) Its super consistent that way to a point of flaw. The other thing is when characters don't move orbitally. Modern rigs have gotten fancier these days where they can "turn" a little bit (it's an illusion of turning) but it's still not fully orbital. Like you'll never see a show pan up over the head of a rigged character, as if you watched the camera move from eye level to, say, looking down on the character from overhead. There's no "3D" feeling at any point. Modern shows fill this in with some frame by frame animation nowadays if they need it. But most shows won't bother, they'll just stick to eye level. You can get different rigs of the same character at different angles, like one from above, one from below, profile, front view, but you won't really see them transition from one to the other. Usually cuts between the shots.
>Like you'll never see a show pan up over the head of a rigged character, as if you watched the camera move from eye level to, say, looking down on the character from overhead
Why don't we see this if the animation is hand drawn anyway? If you're using hand drawn animation, you're not using rigs, right? Something like Gravity Falls, it doesn't seem wildly different to shows I've seen animated on rigs.
Sorry if questions are dumb, I am just curious as I'd like to learn more about this stuff.
5 months ago
Anonymous
>What do all the animation students do once they leave college?
either storyboarding, work at a feature studio, or commercials
or not get a job in the animation industry at all
5 months ago
Anonymous
I'm pretty sure there are 2D animation studios in the west though right? Maybe not many but I feel like I have definitely seen them in the credits of some 2D shows.
I really didn't know this though. I thought the likes of CN and Disney had their animation sort of done in house. I had no idea they'd just do the storyboarding then ship that shit off elsewhere. I still don't know if you're exaggerating slightly or if this is simply an industry fact.
>So if it's all hand drawn, does that mean there are no rigs whatsoever?
Yep, all frame-by-frame.
>Also I posted those shows but they were just an example, I'd guess the same about Amphibia, Owl house, Hilda etc. But again, I'm probably off.
Hilda's rigged, but Amphibia and OH are Fbf yeah.
>If these are all hand drawn, then how come the animation itself looks so basic and sort of stiff?
Aside from the cost it's often the studio's quality itself that's often a huge determining factor in the animation's quality. Most Korean studios are fairly mediocre in terms of output.
Mediocre, but how come I can't really point to even one that feels visually distinguished, when they're taking the time to be hand drawn anyway? If it's hand drawn why is it looking so similar to rigged and not taking liberties? I don't really see camera movements or use of the 2D space and even orbital movement as mentioned earlier seems limited.
This entire time I thought the reason shows look so similar is because they all just use rigs and it's easier to do it that way. Learning it's all hand drawn raises a lot of questions. What software is used? I know Flash and ToonBoom are often used for rigs, what about for hand drawn animation?
>Why don't we see this if the animation is hand drawn anyway?
I imagine it's a cope. They soothe themselves with the thought of their work being drawn frame by frame (by Koreans) while using absolutely no creativity in their storyboarding to give the show cool camera work that frame by frame allows for. Maybe they're afraid of the Koreans screwing it up.
Shows like the simpsons or even family guy do look very stiff and on model, but you have to be on the look out for the tells like when their bodies tumble down some stairs and spin in the process. Or fall forward toward the camera onto their face. Those are also orbital situations you can't do well with rigs
Thanks for the explanation. Family guy is a good example and one that again, I would have absolutely guessed as rigged. I would guess modern Simpsons as rigged too but not classic, dunno why but I don't really watch the former lel.
Just having a hard time wrapping my head round the fact that if the time is taken for this all to be hand drawn anyway, why don't we see a better animated style.
I don't watch it but I think Hazbin looks nicely animated, maybe because it's just rougher around the edges but it seems easier to tell that's hand drawn at times.
5 months ago
Anonymous
If I recall I think simpsons is a mix. Their new intro sequence is absolutely partly rigged. You can have a scene be all frame by frame and then a section be rigged. The babies shaking their fists is a dead giveaway. I haven't seen any newest family guy episodes but they're probably also mixed depending on the situation. It's subtle but there's these moments where a character or object or a part of a character moves without any change/morph whatsoever to its outline, those might be the trickiest to spot for the untrained eye.
Some rigged cartoons will be constantly changing or morphing the outlines, but in a way that's so fluid and consistent between frames that you can tell a computer generated those inbetween(tweened) frames.
The really really hard ones to tell are high level animations like Klaus. That movie looks like straight up cgi but the characters are all hand drawn. Don't know what to suggest in that case. They really went for that cgi perfect motion by hand kind of insane
5 months ago
Anonymous
>You can have a scene be all frame by frame and then a section be rigged
Is that common? To have rigs for your characters when you won't even use them often since most stuff is frame by frame?
How do rigged cartoons constantly change the outlines? I thought by their nature rigged meant staying on model and no change of outlines?
Unless those changes are when there's a shift to hand drawn
I have seen Klaus, it does look really good, although I remember some criticism in that it looks so much like CG, so what was the point in making it 2D at all. I get it I guess.
5 months ago
Anonymous
You can rig something up fairly easily. Lots of online artists will rig up their still illustration to "move" but it's just separating it into sections and moving or morphing each one individually. Way faster and easier than manually animating.
Outlines on rigs can be changed with a sort of liquify effect if you will. Pinching or transforming a shape via a grid or what have you. Some basic experience in an image editing software would help you understand how it works. It's the fluidity and accuracy with which those shapes change that give it away.
I dunno though I ask the same thing. Could have just been cg but I respect the proof that humans can be just as effective as computers with enough effort
5 months ago
Anonymous
Ah right, I see. Thank you, it makes sense then. I guess when they are warped then rigged would look very off in comparison to hand drawn and hand drawn is far more fluid.
5 months ago
Anonymous
>Why don't we see this if the animation is hand drawn anyway?
I imagine it's a cope. They soothe themselves with the thought of their work being drawn frame by frame (by Koreans) while using absolutely no creativity in their storyboarding to give the show cool camera work that frame by frame allows for. Maybe they're afraid of the Koreans screwing it up.
Shows like the simpsons or even family guy do look very stiff and on model, but you have to be on the look out for the tells like when their bodies tumble down some stairs and spin in the process. Or fall forward toward the camera onto their face. Those are also orbital situations you can't do well with rigs
5 months ago
Anonymous
>So if it's all hand drawn, does that mean there are no rigs whatsoever?
Yep, all frame-by-frame.
>Also I posted those shows but they were just an example, I'd guess the same about Amphibia, Owl house, Hilda etc. But again, I'm probably off.
Hilda's rigged, but Amphibia and OH are Fbf yeah.
>If these are all hand drawn, then how come the animation itself looks so basic and sort of stiff?
Aside from the cost it's often the studio's quality itself that's often a huge determining factor in the animation's quality. Most Korean studios are fairly mediocre in terms of output.
> As they take great pride in interesting and engaging shot composition and "camera" work. But that shit costs a frickton
Really? I thought camerawork stuff isn’t that expensive, you just need good directing
5 months ago
Anonymous
The point being good story boarders and directors are expensive, good keyframe artists who can draw proper perspective and characters at any angle are expensive, and hiring an offshore studio who does good inbetweens is more expensive because cheap ones are gonna frick up complex angles somewhere and you'll need to get more scenes reanimated
5 months ago
Anonymous
dp most animation studios offshore the keyframe artists too or is that one thing they actually do in house?
5 months ago
Anonymous
From what I've heard from network shows, keyframes are typically done in-house and the rest is filled in by koreans. Sometimes networks team writers up with English speaking studios like flying bark in Australia though, and flying bark does everything themselves from storyboarding to layouts to keyframes to inbetweens. But again, flying bark is more expensive. They only really work with franchises that have money like tmnt and lego.
5 months ago
Anonymous
I see, thank you. I know keyframes are vital of course, but how much of the overall production are they? Meaning, with all the keyframes, is there still a shit ton left to do for the tweeners?
Are keyframes basically putting the storyboard but into animation, or is it more involved than that?
Also why Korea specifically? There must be studios from other countries that are cheap, right?
5 months ago
Anonymous
I'm just a layman who dabbled in animation so take this with a grain of salt but storyboards exist just for the general flow of scenes across the episode. Timing, queues and direction mainly. If a camera pans, what direction it pans to. Zoom outs, zoom ins, how far to zoom. Which character enters from which side. If a character's head turns, where it should turn to. It's not exactly keyframes but more like "important to depict" frames and what exact time they're meant to occur on. Sometimes you'll see studio leaks of new episodes with a production timer/clock running in the corner. Everything has to occur and move on time. That's the guide for the animation later.
Keyframes are generally all the frames between motion. Inbetweens are where the motion occurs. There's a frickton more keyframes being drawn than story board frames in a cartoon. Ball sitting on the ground on the left is a keyframe. Rolling to the right are inbetweens, then the ball sitting on ground on the right is the next keyframe.
5 months ago
Anonymous
Thanks, I appreciate the explanation, it's helpful.
I kinda thought maybe the keyframes were just the storyboards put into practice, but it seems like while it is that, it's much more too. I just wondered because sometimes I see fairly detailed storyboards or animatics, to where you can pretty much get the general gist of everything. But I've also seen far less detailed ones.Not sure if there is a difference between a storyboard and animatic actually, but yeah.
5 months ago
Anonymous
As far as I know an animatic is just a storyboard made easier because it's already pre-timed properly into a video format with all the zooming and panning. I've heard it's considered overkill, but if you're doing really complex shots and action movements it can help a lot. There's some amazing animatics for Rise of the TMNT by an animator who I believe won some kind of award for his work. But I recall another animator commenting that what he did was not standard practice. Storyboards used to be way more detailed back in the day because cartoons used more complicated camerawork and angles back in the day. These days you can get away with scribbling everything because there's little need for nuance in the art. It doesn't help that story boarders in modern production also work in layouts and keyframing and whatever else at the same time. They're basically doing 5 different jobs at once that used to require 5 individual people. No time to agonize over detailed storyboards.
Thanks.
Would you say it's not really worth learning CG then if it gets outsourced to India? That's the cheapest of the cheap, right?
As per SEA countries, I've noticed too that the likes of Singapore and Indonesia seem to have quite a rise in animation. I'm not exactly sure why or how it's come about but there are some popular universities for animation over there
Cheers. I'm not familiar with the cg part of the industry myself. I've tried blender and SFM but don't know anyone working officially in 3D, unlike 2D where I had a few acquaintences. I'd bet there's more need for modeling and rigging in the west though than straight up animation gruntwork. Just an educated guess tho
5 months ago
Anonymous
Thanks for the explanation, the storyboards/animatic stuff makes sense.
One thing I would ask though, but I would guess it might be a long answer is why are cartoons less comlpex now than back in the day? What changed?
I know things were likely handled in house before but it's still hand drawn animation, right? So why was it better in the past?
>I've tried blender and SFM but don't know anyone working officially in 3D
Interesting. I've considered picking it up in the past, not just as a hobby but maybe as a path but if the gruntwork is just outsourced to India, maybe I'd struggle to find footing there.
Do videogames outsource their cut scenes and stuff too? They have a lot of animation going on
5 months ago
Anonymous
>Do videogames outsource their cut scenes and stuff too?
Sometimes, yeah.
https://nintendosoup.com/game-freak-outsources-creation-of-pokemon-models-and-animations-to-over-100-employees/
5 months ago
Anonymous
>what changed
The people working in animation and the amount of money networks are willing to spend. Companies with money and willing to spend money like netflix create shows like green eggs and ham. Lots of complex camerawork and fun directing. No clue what studios worked on it. TV networks are reluctant to spend money, so they're reluctant to hire more competent animators/artists, and reluctant to outsource to a more skilled foreign studio or ask more of the foreign studios. Money is the tldr.
Not sure about videogame cutscenes, just the programming part I could say with certainty. I just know a frick ton of kids cgi animation is being done in india
5 months ago
Anonymous
>Do videogames outsource their cut scenes and stuff too?
Sometimes, yeah.
https://nintendosoup.com/game-freak-outsources-creation-of-pokemon-models-and-animations-to-over-100-employees/
Thanks, interesting to learn.
Shitty at the same time because my goals of learning CG animation may not be for much if I can't take it into something else.
I know networks don't want to spend too much money on animation, but I'd have thought that with advanced tools at animators disposal and things like being able to outsource on the cheap, costs wouldn't be higher than they were before. Or if they are, then studios would get more done as opposed to less
5 months ago
Anonymous
Inflation, cost of living where animation studios are located going up, ceos and executives taking bigger and bigger slices of the pie. Cheaper more efficient tools don't mean better faster products, they tend to mean richer corporations and cheaper products. Sadly.
5 months ago
Anonymous
I see. Shame the thread is dying, thanks for the discussion
5 months ago
Anonymous
You too
5 months ago
Anonymous
Forgot to mention, we used to hire japan, we switched to Korea because it's cheaper. still largely use korea right now but I heard it's catching on to use SEA countries lately. 2D animation is a special industry with a specific skill set. You want a place that has lots of people formally trained in it which japan and korea have. Lots of Indians are trained in cgi animation nowadays so cg animation gets outsourced there iirc along with programming jobs for video games
5 months ago
Anonymous
Thanks.
Would you say it's not really worth learning CG then if it gets outsourced to India? That's the cheapest of the cheap, right?
As per SEA countries, I've noticed too that the likes of Singapore and Indonesia seem to have quite a rise in animation. I'm not exactly sure why or how it's come about but there are some popular universities for animation over there
>Do people really hate rigging?
Yeah people think it's soulless since it's not hand drawn cel animation.
Maybe I'm dumb, but if you asked me, I would guess most animated shows these days have rigs and don't hand draw all their animation. A lot of shows look sort of basic to be hand drawn, and I don't mean the art style, but the movement itself.
Am I way off here? How do I learn more to distinguish differences?
The main thing is the tweening, that fluid motion between pose 1 and pose 2. Rigs don't warp or morph, none of their body segments change size (unless the size changing is the point.) Its super consistent that way to a point of flaw. The other thing is when characters don't move orbitally. Modern rigs have gotten fancier these days where they can "turn" a little bit (it's an illusion of turning) but it's still not fully orbital. Like you'll never see a show pan up over the head of a rigged character, as if you watched the camera move from eye level to, say, looking down on the character from overhead. There's no "3D" feeling at any point. Modern shows fill this in with some frame by frame animation nowadays if they need it. But most shows won't bother, they'll just stick to eye level. You can get different rigs of the same character at different angles, like one from above, one from below, profile, front view, but you won't really see them transition from one to the other. Usually cuts between the shots.
It's not exactly in model but it's not that dar either. No one is willing to have a level headed discussion about the "calarts"/beanmouth style trend.
5 months ago
Anonymous
it's so funny because the "calarts" style has been out of fasion for a while now
5 months ago
Anonymous
Not true, Big City Greens, Kiff and Craig of the Creek are still there, Gravity Falls is getting some new content soon as well. It's far from out of fashion, it's simply not as intense as mid 2010s
5 months ago
Anonymous
Kiff doesn't even look like the meme.
5 months ago
Anonymous
it's so funny because the "calarts" style has been out of fasion for a while now
calarts wasn't the point of the post, it's just an image I attached which had a few recent animated shows in it
Rigging class consists of about 20 people majority of the time.
3 will love it and want to do that since they like mechanical type jobs and puzzle solving.
The other 17 students will hope no one ever asks them to rig a damn thing ever again
>simpler animation.
Depends on what you mean by that. I mean, I don't blame animation fans for not wanting something about the quality of say, Dingo Pictures or Paddy the Pelican.
games make profit from the point of sale in a way that animation can't
>games make profit
If they're notable enough to, and that's a big "IF"
I mean a person could make a good game on their own, but you really need more than one person to produce an indie animation. You also need to market the shit out of it to garner up a big enough fanbase to buy merch so you can continue to produce episode of said animation.
cause video games are more effort efficient. with a few seconds of animation you can squeeze out several minutes if not hours of gameplay . you can reuse a lot of animation frames,
cause it's easier to make and distribute, and support indie games. This is also why there are zero good indie live action movies or series that are strictly on the internet.
I'm replaying a mid/low budget JRPG from 2009 and you can just FEEL the budget draining away during the very brief very rare anime cutscenes. They just couldn't afford any more than that
Exposure and means of income
Games sell copies
A series can only get money from ads, merchandise or putting the series up for streaming if they are lucky. Nobody will purchase the right to watch one series.
This actually seems fairly inexpensive for an animated show too.
Zeurel can handle so much of the work himself, guess it drives down the cost of labour by a lot.
ngl Im happy i became a programmer first and artist second
if i can figure out a good enough gameplay loop, I can shit out a few artistic games for ze $$$
think naissance or lethal company (not that they are my metric for success here, i'm not a moron)
I'd never pay for "Monkey Wrench" even if it's an indie game instead of animation simply because that project have zero appeal to me.
I'd donate money to other indie animation turned indie games tho.
I hate Monkey Wrench, the main characters are too ugly to look at for a full episode. The guy is a good animator but he is a shit designer. I hope he cancels this and starts a new project, possibly one where someone else designs the characters for him.
Too desperate for the youtube clout.
They need to start DMCAing videos after they blow up and using Newgrounds as permanent repository, and allowing a few to slip through the algos from time to time
Animators have skin in the game when it comes to algorithms, can produce niche content youtube couldn't, and they have the collective audience to do something about it
They unironically need Nebula for animators and comic makers. Could even be doubly profitable if they allow tips on top of the normal subscription (resulting in a nicer cut of donos that cycle back to their own projects)
Youtube is bleeding, and most of its content is algo chasing slop, a youtube competitor doesnt have to let every loser with a webcam and OBS flood their databanks with amnesia playthroughs.
How would you make money from these animations? Especially since they use copyrighted characters.
Pretty much this.
Almost every answer here is wrong. The real reason is twofold:
First, you can create and tell a complete experience in a game with zero animation or programming experience needed. Toby Fox created Undertale with some of the worst programming ever seen. Fear and Hunger or Omori are made in RPGMaker. If you want to do something larger with gameplay you need programming chops (or a hired programming) but that's not even necessary.
Second, it's hard to sell a series. You can't go on Steam and buy an early access copy of a new animation series. The only subgenre that gets away with that is porn, since as it turns out people are willing to use patreon and so forth to pay animators doing porn. Should be zero surprise that most animators start with porn to build up capital.
Also you can make asset-flipped games but there's nothing comparable for animation.
starting a game is hard work but once you get over the hump of programming mechanics and making assets you can coast for a long time with a significantly faster workflow. it's like climbing up a mountain and skiing down the other side vs walking 50 miles in a straight line on flat land
This. Programming is hard, but once you get into the flow it's easy.
Animating is also hard, but once you get into the flow... it's still hard, and it still takes an eternity.
starting a game is hard work but once you get over the hump of programming mechanics and making assets you can coast for a long time with a significantly faster workflow. it's like climbing up a mountain and skiing down the other side vs walking 50 miles in a straight line on flat land
That really, REALLY depends on the language you're learning, especially if you're using a scripting language on a premade engine like Unity or Game Maker rather than making your own from scratch using C++/C# or some shit.
>ITT morons say it's expensive
OP didn't ask how much it costs, but why it's hard to make money. Cost plays a role but is not the full picture.
Here's an answer: nobody buys 1 episode to watch. People buy a whole season. Also Black person.
Almost every answer here is wrong. The real reason is twofold:
First, you can create and tell a complete experience in a game with zero animation or programming experience needed. Toby Fox created Undertale with some of the worst programming ever seen. Fear and Hunger or Omori are made in RPGMaker. If you want to do something larger with gameplay you need programming chops (or a hired programming) but that's not even necessary.
Second, it's hard to sell a series. You can't go on Steam and buy an early access copy of a new animation series. The only subgenre that gets away with that is porn, since as it turns out people are willing to use patreon and so forth to pay animators doing porn. Should be zero surprise that most animators start with porn to build up capital.
>Toby Fox created Undertale with some of the worst programming ever seen.
FWIR he mostly used Drag & Drop with some fairly moderate GML implementation in some parts. That said GML in itself's simple to learn compared to most languages, with even some helpful documentation to boot.
Making a game isn't real programming unless you make your own engine
Difficult to do if you're not very well-versed in any of the mainstream programming languages, hence why most premade game engines provide a decent middle ground to those who want to make games w/o having to get into the technical nitty-gritty.
Cinemaphile simultaneously thinks animation is dying and should be saved yet will not support anyone or anything independent or otherwise unless its corporate slop or porn
A high quality cartoon like what you would see in a studio production would require a whole team to consistently put out new material and people don't just work for free.
Trying to aim for studio quality when you're starting out is a bit misguided tho, imo.
Helluva Boss at least had the benefit of already having a dedicated fanbase, but I heard they pay pennies over there. Makes me wonder how they can even keep going honestly.
A HB 7 minute short in the 60s to be produced was $3000 for the whole thing. With inflation that's now around $29,700 today. There was only 2 or 3 animators on those and they churned them like there was no tomorrow meaning stable work.
I don't have exact estimates, but that sounds like it was a much better gig that now.
They want mime shill garbage like The Amazing Digital Circus.
Just make what you want but study the animation process and find creative workarounds to save money and time.
I wish more of these ambitious projects did this.
We'd get more episode and if it's popular then you can start asking for money from people for a quality boost in later episodes.
It does not need to match TV quality right off the bat. Most people will understand its a much smaller team putting this together and it's not cheap to try and match it right away.
>study the animation process and find creative workarounds to save money and time.
But then people would b***h that the animators cheaped out and they'll still demand better
Cinemaphile, where even if the animation is fantastic they'll still find something to b***h about. So no reason to care if they're petty about your budget constraints.
So what I can't help but wonder is why do so many games, especially indie games that don't even have a huge budget, have these gorgeous 2D animated trailers?
I've lost count of the number of games I've thought looked interesting because they had a kickass animated trailer, only to look at the gameplay and it's just generic shit with none of the art style matching what was shown.
Isn't it expensive to have a 2D animated short made?
Because trailers are usually a minute long and shows are several minutes long. If they had to stretch out the trailer to 22 minutes with the same budget the animation quality would greatly suffer.
Right of course, I'm not saying why isn't this quality matched elsewhere, I'm more saying how are these small indie studios affording these trailers consistently?
I've seen them for games so low profile I don't even remember their names, I just wonder how they're affording it as I'd guess it was much more expensive.
it's just odd to me how often I come across stellar 2D animated trailers, that actually seems fully hand drawn in the video game space, yet in the professional animation space, I don't really see much of that or the same style.
I know it's apples and oranges but still
Passion projects? There's a ton of small animators on twitter who are incredible when they're given the freedom to go all out.
Shantae isn't a particularly major game series but it got an opening animation sequence made by Studio Trigger. I tried quick searching how much it cost them but I haven't found any info yet.
?si=OO2Z_cQGS1q-Bs5O
I imagine it costs a pretty penny for even 30 seconds of this animation, but WayForward makes enough with mild success to afford it
I've seen a lot of the twitter animators, no doubt very impressive. Some make shorts all by themselves that seem to have all the aspects of a high quality studio production. But in most cases it seems like these trailers are commissioned. Especially when the games themselves have no animation even remotely close to what's displayed in the trailer. I think the Shantae games have good animation even in game, right? The animated trailers at least give you a somewhat decent representation of the game itself.
I get you on that. It has shades of that whole "bullshot" phenomenon dev studios partake in.
Drives me nuts because I basically like/love any game that leans into the Cinemaphile side of things, so I'm often deceived.
Shantae started out as a pixel sprite style game, and it's art and quality improved massively since it started because the studio took what it earned and invested it into improving the product. I'm sure they'll keep this trend if they're still making more. Ideally this is how it should be right? Start within your means and focus on gameplay people want, if you have a good product and you treat it right it will gradually improve into whatever your dream vision of it was. I'm not sure why we don't see this in animation as a medium. A cartoon that starts out visually simpler but offering a great show. Then with popularity improves itself until it's what you envisioned all along
So what I can't help but wonder is why do so many games, especially indie games that don't even have a huge budget, have these gorgeous 2D animated trailers?
I've lost count of the number of games I've thought looked interesting because they had a kickass animated trailer, only to look at the gameplay and it's just generic shit with none of the art style matching what was shown.
Isn't it expensive to have a 2D animated short made?
>Right of course, I'm not saying why isn't this quality matched elsewhere, I'm more saying how are these small indie studios affording these trailers consistently?
I'm a indie dev and 3D animator, I know of another indie dev that got a deal from their publisher of a $150K advance in exchange for a 100% of sales until they pay off the $150K, then 30% of sales after that. I'd assume these other indie games that have high quality 2D animated trailer get a similar deal and spend $6K or so from the advance to commission a trailer. Otherwise if the don't have a publisher, they were probably rich already and invested $6k or so themselves.
Going back at this, it also has to do on how expensive animation tools are compared to indie dev tools
things like RPGMaker, Clickteam or Gamemaker are one time purchase 20 dollars, tops, or even open source engines, like Unity or UE
Animation tools like Harmony or Animate rely on a monthly paid subscription of 40 dollars, and the one time purchase is nearly on the 1000, sure, there's Blender, but that's CGI
There is higher costs involved with game dev than animation when it comes to 3D at least, 2D would about the same but animators can get away with pirating the tools more than game devs who have a slightly greater chance of getting caught. Cost isn't a issue, it's that no one pays for non-porn animation.
>$6K or so from the advance to commission a trailer
Is that the cost of a trailer, 6k? I guess that would make sense, I thought it would be more.
Thanks for sharing this information, it would make sense then if they are striking deals like that. What kind of games you make? Did you get into dev-ing or animating first? I'm thinking of picking one of them up
>Is that the cost of a trailer, 6k? I guess that would make sense, I thought it would be more.
It could more, $6K-$12K for a minute or so trailer. >Thanks for sharing this information, it would make sense then if they are striking deals like that. What kind of games you make? Did you get into dev-ing or animating first? I'm thinking of picking one of them up
Right now I'm making a porn game to help finance my dream game, I got into animation first. I'd recommend learning both, especially if you don't plan to work with anyone else, as you will need both if go with game dev. Animation was easier for me learn than programming.
5 months ago
Anonymous
>It could more, $6K-$12K for a minute or so trailer.
That's kinda cheaper than I thought in fairness.
It then made me wonder why we don't see more animated trailers elsewhere then, but then it dawned on me other media doesn't really need them like videogames do.
I guess I can see where indie games can get that kind of budget
Thanks for the tip. To be honest I'm not really sure I want to game dev, I kind of think it'd be nice to work in vidya but I don't see myself programming, y'know? There are other roles though, I just don't know if I'd have many ideas for a game. >animation first
Did you use Blender to learn? If you're self taught, roughly how long did it take ya? >dream game
Any details you care to share? Don't have to, just curious. Good luck either way anon
5 months ago
Anonymous
first >Did you use Blender to learn? If you're self taught, roughly how long did it take ya?
Yeah I use blender, it took around 2 years to learn it. I use Zbrush for sculpting as when I started blender was shit at sculpting performance, it's much better now and Zbrush isn't necessary. I also use Substance Painter for texturing which Blender is still lacking in, so it might be worth it still. SP is pretty intuitive, Zbrush isn't though. I'd share tutorials but the ones I used to learn are outdated for 2.79.
game >Any details you care to share? Don't have to, just curious. Good luck either way anon
Thanks you. I don't want to share about my dream game since I mentioned making a porn game. Good luck to you as well.
Are you worried that being associated to porn games could tarnish your image? I guess it shouldn't be much of a issue if it doesn't contain anything too taboo but still.
I worry a little but as long as I keep my accounts separate I shouldn't have any issues and the porn isn't anything taboo.
5 months ago
Anonymous
Thanks for the tips and stuff. 2 years doesn't sound too bad. >used to learn are outdated
Yeah I encounter this a lot, which kind of makes it annoying to find good tutorials since so many you find are indeed outdated.
I know it wouldn't be the worst to use older tutorials but man if there are newer tools it'd be best to learn to use them.
Makes sense on not sharing the game, I get that
5 months ago
Anonymous
Are you worried that being associated to porn games could tarnish your image? I guess it shouldn't be much of a issue if it doesn't contain anything too taboo but still.
Passion projects? There's a ton of small animators on twitter who are incredible when they're given the freedom to go all out.
Shantae isn't a particularly major game series but it got an opening animation sequence made by Studio Trigger. I tried quick searching how much it cost them but I haven't found any info yet.
?si=OO2Z_cQGS1q-Bs5O
I imagine it costs a pretty penny for even 30 seconds of this animation, but WayForward makes enough with mild success to afford it
>Where do these indie devs get the budget for that?
from their games being mega successful.
Dead Cells sold 850k before leaving early access and 10 months later reached 2 million while Vampire Survivors sold over 5 million.
5 months ago
Anonymous
That's Dead Cells and VS, but I see games which don't have anywhere close to that success putting out 2D trailers
5 months ago
Anonymous
such as?
5 months ago
Anonymous
The thing is, I can't remember the name of any of them
I tried to search and couldn't find them either
So now it's just going to sound like I pulled it out of my ass and I'm bullshitting you. But you have to believe me anon. I've seen animated trailers for games that simply don't have that kind of financial success. You have to believe.
On another note, are 3D animated trailers cheaper than 2D animated ones, by some margin? Not ones made in the game engine, but just separately produced 3D trailers. Because I see a fair few of them
Not very expensive, also it goes into a different column, so to speak, it's a marketing cost and not a dev cost. Also a super important thing is it's a very predictable cost, you go to bobbypills or whatever and ask for 30 seconds of animation, the estimate isn't gonna change after that and if it should then they're just gonna cut frames, while for dev if a programmer gives you an estimate they guarantee to be exact they're lying through their teeth to get you to sign, and the actual cost is much more variable.
Because it's meant to grab your attention.
It's the main reason why (even to this day) many animated opens are much better animated than the actual show, if they have an animated opening that is.
Because it's like a minute long at most and there's little/no voice acting, no lip syncing, no plot, and often uses lots of little cheats (like your image not having a background or complex shading/lighting.)
It's not hard to drop some money on some animator on Fiverr or something and give them some basic outline and some concept art.
I feel like I really don't understand the process these fricks go into where they do this and somehow don't think they come off as scam pushing shitbags.
Animation from a studio will have a big-ol dollar sign attached to each episode.
Lots and lots of hands in the pie.
Then you get these things where some pencil monkey wants to just flex his art chops instead of telling a story.
A sickening amount of indie comics including webcomics are guilty of the same focus on visuals and it all just echos the same shit in movies and videogame development.
Indie games have a massive infrastructure that allows them to be sold, publicized and even get investment from publishers. There's also a huge number of people who have the basic skills required for game dev (especially people who used to work for bigger studios and then went their own way), while there's not much equivalent for animation. Indie games also benefit from a massive growth of things like pre-made assets which animation doesn't benefit from in the same way.
How come many indie animations nowadays are opting for shows, instead of feature length movies? i don't know much about movie distribution so maybe what I'm saying isn't at all useful or just eats at the money, but at least with movies, you can put them in theatres, or on DVDs, or put out a trailer and have people buy the movie digitally. is there just too much upfront cost to make movies?
To give more measured answer about why indie animation is harder to cash in than indie games, it comes down to three things: >Animation is the most expensive part of game design, and even then games do everything they can to automate parts of it and reuse frames and animation cycles. Indie animation is basically taking the most expensive part of the project and making it the whole project itself. >If you have to rely purely on your animation, without using the cost saving measures game use, you end up with an utterly massive workload. You can make a game in time it takes one person to make one minute of animated action. >Distribution of indie animation sucks compared to the distribution of the games. With games, you can sell them directly to people. With animation, you are usually on mercy of either crowd funding or advert revenue.
It's not about the cost, it's about how much easier games are to monetize.
If you make an indie game you can sell it on steam, gog, itch, etc...
If you make an indie animation, well nobody is going to buy a single episodes or even a few episodes, so you'll publish your animation for free and HOPE to monetize it some other way. Ads probably don't pay near enough. Merchandise is probably your best bet. All in all it's much messier.
>"hey, enjoyed the pilot? wanna watch the other episodes? go to our website and pay $5 so you can have full access to the season and if you want more, subscribe to our patreon to get more BTS stuff!
why don't they simply do this?
or better yet, why not make an animation version of nebula for animation creators?
If you're online enough to be paying patreons for content, you're online enough to know how to stream and pirate.
Plus, with the likes of Netflix, there is so much content to stream and watch for that $5 instead, that they can just go elsewhere. Yeah it's not the same and the quality might not be as good, but honestly a lot of people watch content for the sake of watching content rather than looking for something specific. It's why the Netflix model works.
Most people are too comfortable or spoiled with shit like Netflix or crunchyroll and probably think paying $5 for just one episode or series is just too much.
But it could be done, but you need a very hardcore audience that will support you no matter what. People like Sam Hyde that have a very die hard fanbase that hang on his every word will gladly pay for content. Animation wise Vivziepop is big enough that maybe she could do it. But if we are being honest I don't see many people here paying $4.99 for the next Monkey Wrench episode. I would gladly pay for a show that I actually like if I didn't live in a third world hell hole
Real reason is that animators can't play nice with eachother and would allow the far left to overtake a platform like it immeadiately >so what chud
Its not *always* the ideas I take issue with, the LGBT+ and ally community is extremely toxic and mentally ill, countless times one spill their spaghetti and torches groups like SleepyCabin
Putting em in control of communities results in boring hugboxes like reddit or tumblr
These issues fall to the way side further when you consider many animators refuse to humble themselves or learn the business of animation
Over exert, over extend, and over pay is the motto of most indie animation I see
But I guess thats a consequence of every animation being make or break, and the possibility of it being their only chance to get the series made
A little humility and a willingness to work in a team would go a long way for these guys, hell a SleepyCabin 2 with Vizie/TADC/the Ghost of SC1 could probably pull it off
It doesn't have to be for political reasons, artists are just fickle in general and get uppity if they have to share or get along with artists not in their immediate circle
And even then they're very two-faced with the other artists they associate with, the minute one of them starts doing better than the rest they'll throw that artist under the bus until they get something out of it
They treat life like it's still high school and they desperately want to sit at the cool kids table except that table is twitter and the other cool kids are just other losers
What the frick artists do you follow? If it’s literally who’s on Twitter, I get how you can see em like that, but I stick to mainly chill industry types/devoted hobbyists and none of them act this way.
If it’s NSFW artists, I get it though. A lot are chill, but a good chunk get weirdly insecure about everything
Paying for a game just feels more worth your money. We are used to cartoons being "free", paid off by ad sponsorship on tv.
It doesn't help that Monkey Wrench is just not that interesting. It doesn't even have a dedicated writing spot, and it shows.
>your parents paying for cable and sitting through hours of shitty commercials between shows that waste time you could be doing something else >"""free"""
Was buying home media for cartoon shows (not movies) ever common?
[...]
Free-to-air television exists anon.
I think anon's point is that the time being used to sit through TV advertisements is taken advantage of because you could be watching another channel or having sex or touching grass. Time is money. It's the same principle behind choosing what roller coaster to go on in a theme park based on how long the lines are.
It's not like the ads on youtube where you can skip them or install an adblocker.
Was buying home media for cartoon shows (not movies) ever common?
>your parents paying for cable and sitting through hours of shitty commercials between shows that waste time you could be doing something else >"""free"""
Classic cartoons also did not have "a dedicated writing spot." You're just demanding to be the one to tell artists what to do, or someone just like you. It's the style of cartoon monkey wrench is that motivates the hate.
And you're opening your mouth because I'm attacking Homestuck and the trannies it produced elsewhere. Shut up, try to derail an animation discussion again and Industry animators will be whining
And you're opening your mouth because I'm attacking Homestuck and the trannies it produced elsewhere. Shut up, try to derail an animation discussion again and Industry animators will be whining
>guy arrived.
Thread's dead. And it was such a good thread too.
What you're communicating is that I'm spoiling the "thread" of your narrative. And no abusing the creator of Monkey Wrench to serve the industry isn't a good "thread." You're trying to violate my mind with "guilt" about potentially spoiling industry projects with my criticism, even though they have built thousands of careers on things like Steven Universe made with my artistic inspiration, Steven Universe being created by a fellow John K student and Cinemaphileanon.
Screenshotted for sending to Industry people
If you hate Homestuck then why were you trying to copy MSPaint Adventures using AIslop?
My best friend worked on Homestuck and I am passionate about AI as my big video game project from 2012 I was developing with my best friend is about AI development.
>"Abusing the creator"
What the frick are you even talking about? We are discussing the production process behind animation and the different ways to develop something.
It's called a normal conversation. Nobody here wants him to fail, quite the opposite actually.
Not like you'll ever have something like that.
Lmao your effort to violate my mind after getting called out for it is just embarrassing dude, tell the women who tell you what to do that it's time to move on from this, emasculated individual >It's called a normal conversation.
No you're trying to manufacture a narrative about the creator of monkey wrench, I can see straight through it but I'm usually polite enough not to mention it. Just like Superman doesn't go around using his x-ray vision for no reason.
5 months ago
Anonymous
What narrative? >I'm usually polite
You have zero self awareness.
5 months ago
guy
Yeah buddy I'm not going to let my self-comprehension be defined by the industry culture like yourself, mentally dominated by people like troony storyboard artists. That's an intentional decision, not an accident, I'm 33 years old.
Just give up. People can read my stories if they want to see how I express my unique identity, but I know you don't because you're not unique
5 months ago
Anonymous
You're not answering the question. What narrative am I and others trying to push on Zeurel?
I'm also not industry and never plan to be a part of it. I'm just an animation fanatic interested in discussing how to make stuff.
5 months ago
guy
>Interrogation
All right bud I'm going to message some of those industry artists with a screenshot and tell them to stop your harassment since you can't listen to yourself.
I am a PARANORMAL artist, demanding me to explain everything is a psychological violation and an attack on my creativity. I'm going to message industry artists until you STOP, not act disingenuous.
5 months ago
Anonymous
Message all the industry artists you want, I have nothing to lose because I don't want to be part of the industry. Not that they'd even know who I am anyway.
Not everyone thinks like you so if you're going to be fricking vague then people are going to ask you questions.
5 months ago
guy
That's what industry trolls always say to try to dampen my conviction. Then later they give up. I'm going to wait on the people I messaged a little bit then I'll barrage again if you're still talking >going to be fricking vague
I am a paranormal artist. I like mystery. There's no reason for interrogation besides to extract information from me because unlike a lot of people who work in the industry I am a creative person and yet they will not allow me any income or credit in return.
Every time I show up in a thread like this someone like you turns psychotic to represent the industry. Stop this programming.
5 months ago
Anonymous
>this schizo somehow still hasn't been banned
5 months ago
guy
This is a metaphor for me being able to participate in the animation community. You can't change that because people are making projects using my artistic inspiration. Like Helluva Boss.
[...]
Using AI is not making art
This is queering my content because I use AI as my collaborator. It's doubly pathetic because humans refuse to be collaborators with me.
Even if I was, I'd never want to work with you or your friends anyway so you'd be doing me a big favor.
I'm just asking to elaborate your claim which 99.99999% of the population of Earth would say is a reasonable request.
This is psychological abuse because my notions of mystery have not spread around society yet. (Understandable considering that mystery is mystery) messaged another group of Industry people, so stop next time instead of searching for a way to violate my brain.
5 months ago
Anonymous
>Asking a question is "violating my brain"
You are mentally ill.
5 months ago
guy
I see you've fully crumpled it down.
And now here's the part where I say that you can learn a lot about my artistic perspective by actually reading and looking at my work, I just expect you're afraid of that because I'm a Catholic, and so you want to mine ideas from me from comments.
In fact that's what you just said by translating being religious as being mentally ill.
5 months ago
Anonymous
I'm Catholic too and my family raised me to be that.
You're mentally ill.
5 months ago
guy
You're whatever benefits you in the discussion and whatever you think will get you artistic inspiration for free. I'm calling every single tactic you're using and you're showing the pathetic nature of Industry people who abuse people like the creator of monkey wrench like they are slaves of Hollywood.
You're strengthening my resolve for ruining Christmas for industry people. There's no limit to how much of my life you'll waste without that.
5 months ago
Anonymous
Ok you do that. Tell them my last name is Perez as well so they know who to look out for.
5 months ago
Anonymous
You're not an artist. Show us something you drew with your own two hands.
5 months ago
guy
Instead of responding to you I will respond to people in the industry since after all you are just their mouthpiece, looking to cause emotional damage.
Can you explain how a paranormal artist differs from other artists, please?
You're doing what I just told you not to do. I know you're used to not listening to people on the internet but I can easily rack up therapy bills of people in the industry so shut up.
5 months ago
Anonymous
>schizo refuses to answer questions then gets mad at the person asking the question for being smarter than him
5 months ago
guy
"Smart" means connected to the industry here. "Intelligence" coming from knowing them, their culture, and being aware of what they're working on behind the scenes. Unfortunate for you that they all have tons of connections to me and so I can reshape your "intelligence" at any time.
If you want me to expose your psychology that's a nice gift to people like the creator of monkey wrench
Engagement, cost of production is one thing, but engagement is another.
People pay tops what, 20 dollars for a movie ticket? That's even being generous. Unless they go to some gimmick theatre that offers an experience.
Blu-rays, people will pay 10-20 for a movie, wait for it on sale to own the ability to play it again and again.
Indie games still have gameplay you engage with. Animation you watch will never have that same engagement, you're watching it. Videogames you're controlling it, in whatever way it's set up to navigate through the story rather than ride through the story.
People are willing to pay for an experience they hadn't had before that they can engage with. Indie games can offer that, it's a lot harder for indie animation to offer something you can't get watching a higher budget project that pulls it off better and longer.
Hi budget projects are completely dishonest slop in animation.
5 months ago
Anonymous
>being this delulu
5 months ago
guy
1. You're barely capable of communicating anything. You don't read, you don't respond, you just meme on cue. 2. The act of pretending like industry people don't go on the internet needs to die fully. While they were chasing that Willy Wonka fantasy they alienated kids from animation, they destroyed the potential of promising series like Steven Universe, their industry fell apart and lost creator-driven initiatives, and many other things happened because they were lost in their own heads.
You people feel the need to grasp for control of monkey wrench out of jealousy that he is still capable of making something original and cool, even if it isn't perfect.
I get your point, but the first sentence confused me. I think you meant to say 12fps is better for animation. Most everything, CGI included, is animated at 24 fps. It's only video games that get animated at 30/60 fps.
I will point out that a lot of animators add a lot of unnecessary fluidity because they want to add it to their portfolios. In the hopes of getting hired by a larger studio. Someone like Zuerel should really reel it back though, he's already proven himself capable of working for a studio.
>Someone like Zuerel should really reel it back though, he's already proven himself capable of working for a studio.
This is just nakedly condemning him for animating as an animator out of the marxist impulse that he's making people who can't animate like him look bad.
5 months ago
Anonymous
>promising series like Steven Universe
lel, only 30 something lgbtq morons watched this, which is why the massive push with merch and even videogames was a fiasco, and thus ended the attempt at establishing a franchise.
they need to make shows that hook kids and early teens, but they can't because shows are made by ~30 year old SJW's for ~30 year old SJW's, and that's why western animation is dead.
meanwhile anime is thriving, and it's generally not even particularly good, it's just that compared to the shit that is current day western animation, it seems amazing.
5 months ago
Anonymous
The first season was a decent kids show with adventuring magical people that fought monsters and nabbed magical artifacts from ancient temples. It worked.
Somehow that turned into wacky gay people hanging out in a beach town doing wacky gay mundane shit in all the later seasons though.
Sort of like how Adventure Time was about a kid adventurer who fought monsters in the first season, and then was existential cerebral crap in all the other seasons.
5 months ago
Anonymous
Zeurel is upset with how much its costing and people are giving suggestions on how he could take creative steps to save money.
5 months ago
Anonymous
Spamming industry workers' Twitter DMs with your schizo shit doesn't mean you have connections. You just bothered people
5 months ago
guy
Steven Universe was inspired by me, the owl house was inspired by me, we came from the same communities, they fell apart without me. My best friend worked on both Homestuck and undertale which is common fandom history to today's animation people. And you trolls can say NOTHING real to these facts.
There are many other projects like every project attached to those projects.
Genuinely have a nice day.
Yeah I'm destroying your industry instead since you thought that was a great response to make thousands of times.
5 months ago
Anonymous
What's your real name, where are your credits on the shows
5 months ago
Anonymous
Genuinely have a nice day.
5 months ago
Anonymous
>my content
Where?
All I've seen is pathetic robotic mistakes that you told some electric moron to make
5 months ago
guy
You're getting more childish because behind the industry person act you're just a stupid kid in an adult body who belongs nowhere near a serious discussion, trying to control the narrative about monkey wrench. Are you fricking done yet?
5 months ago
Anonymous
Even if I was, I'd never want to work with you or your friends anyway so you'd be doing me a big favor.
I'm just asking to elaborate your claim which 99.99999% of the population of Earth would say is a reasonable request.
5 months ago
Anonymous
That's what industry trolls always say to try to dampen my conviction. Then later they give up. I'm going to wait on the people I messaged a little bit then I'll barrage again if you're still talking >going to be fricking vague
I am a paranormal artist. I like mystery. There's no reason for interrogation besides to extract information from me because unlike a lot of people who work in the industry I am a creative person and yet they will not allow me any income or credit in return.
Every time I show up in a thread like this someone like you turns psychotic to represent the industry. Stop this programming.
Using AI is not making art
5 months ago
Anonymous
Can you explain how a paranormal artist differs from other artists, please?
His stuff is carried by good writing, which not only is another topic in itself, but good writing can easily carry "ugly" shows.
Just look at South Park for a huge example maybe not a recent example, but that's another discussion entirely. Not everyone has writing chops, especially ones that can carry an art style.
>Tamers12345
Not only is it not worth a damn, it’s not talked about anywhere outside of Cinemaphile and is entirely dependent on moronic jokes about Sonic Underground. Not exactly what people imagine when you pitch indie animation to them, and Tamers would get rightfully chewed if he suddenly started price gating his work which would be the only way to get money out of it without any form of initial investment.
ChatGPT told me I made a really good script for an animated 1 hour movie that has the possibility of being loved by a large audience and getting funded.
I know it's not 100% reliable but it was trained on a bunch of data and I felt I should tell you all.
Why does this entire thread even exist? The reasons why animation is expensive and time-consuming should be apparent from the moment you start trying to animate something. And once you think about the type of person who's willing to dedicate themselves to doing that until completion you start to realize why the writing quality suffers
It was a thinly veiled thread to make fun of Zeurel/Monkey Wrench, but I like that it kind of became an actual discussion in the differences in both indie industries and mediums. It’s nice actually talking shop while on topic and not just gossiping about e-celebs or dealing with ragebait.
nta but is it not? Games these days have cut scenes that in total stretch over 3 or 4 hours. Of course, they aren't the same quality as you'd find in an animated film or even show, but the sheer volume they have, especially if you consider non cutscene animations, isn't it rather substantial?
>look for animation indie projects >it's all furries
either way you need to hype up a game and then make them download something for money, indie creators can only upload them to youtube, and it's not like they can reach more than a few k of supporters on patreon, so is a different business model, and if you want to produce a full show it's gonna cost you 1m+ even if you use the cheapest twitter animators that you can find, you can make a shitty indie game for much much less
Its because modern animators are fricking hacks and dont know how to write a good story that grips its viewers. Tell me, what would a young man rather consume:
>a show about a fat queer boy who fights evil with the power of gay
or >a video game about slaying evil spirits, killing monsters, and doing badass shit
Zeurel kind of brings it upon himself. He could simplify his character designs, he could utilize a few more held poses here and there, he doesn't need a keyframe EVERY syllable, and the visuals would still be great. With an experienced animation/art director that he could collaborate with, he could EASILY knock out $15k from the needed budget and probably get an episode out a couple of months earlier as a result.
All of this is a moot point because the writing is still lame and doesn't hook in viewers at all. The show should be balls-to-the-wall wordplays and nonsense like Earthworm Jim and instead it's just... A lot of bad one-liners and bad attempts at writing charismatic characters.
He's leaning on the animation more than the writing. The pacing, jokes, and dialogue seems all a little off. Not enough to say it's bad, but it's not great. So we get an average show with higher quality in animation that only enthusiasts and animators would appreciate. Digital circus grew huge buzz on the designs and premise of being stuck in a digital world with an ending that hammers it home. Not that original to Tron or anime with the same plot but it had things that worked. When animation is at the top of positives, you're having issues you don't want to address with characters and story. He needs to pivot in the writing and designs. because he can't keep going on. I don't think he is close to breaking even. He's getting help with Patreon but ad revenue is way too low to keep him ahead in getting more episodes out in a timely way. He needs higher views and merch and he reupload his episodes on a new channel and the algorithm can easily remove you from recommended so he is only hurting himself because you can rebrand your account than risking a new channel.
If someday I get to be the boss of my OWN Indie Animation Company, would bully & make artists do my shit for cheap, and make them feel bad to the point they slave themselves to do my bidding.
After all, a suffering artist is a productive artist.
Of course I don't live in a "First world" shithole, how could you tell?
Are they counting mobile games? If they're counting mobile games, there's your answer... but even if they aren't the answer is the same: Microtransactions.
You basically have to pay to unlock anything these days.
Trips of truth I've been suggesting this for animation for a while. It could be a really simple game too, so long as it's fun and captures what the shows about
Trips of truth I've been suggesting this for animation for a while. It could be a really simple game too, so long as it's fun and captures what the shows about
I'm going to guess that a cartoonist being forced to leap into the world of game dev is a very daunting one. Maybe an indie creator has a good idea on how to budget a YouTube series, who to hire, what qualities to look for in their crew, roughly how much time and money something should cost. But game dev? That's a whole different spreadsheet, and one can easily be scammed by an unreliable studio or an overpriced studio because they're simply not familiar enough with the industry to know better.
Trips of truth I've been suggesting this for animation for a while. It could be a really simple game too, so long as it's fun and captures what the shows about
>$2,500 per minute of animation
This makes the reveal that RWBY costs between $25,000 to $35,000 for every minute of animation even more hilarious. I almost feel bad for RWBYgays, having their entire show dissolve because the people in charge got scammed into using the world's most expensive blender ripoff.
It was far more popular when it was animated with actual shovelware by a few guys that were flying by the seam of their pants. The animation quality has frickall to do with it's success, and if anything is directly tied to it's death since the show is apparently so expensive they have to cancel it and beg for donations online now. But hey, at least it looks nice. Totally worth running the entire show into the ground over.
A videogame usually goes for 5 or 10 dollars. Say you get 1,000 buyers at 5 dollars, thats 5 thousand dollars right there. Now say you get 5 cents a view on your animation. Youd need 500,000 or 500x more primary consumers for the same gain. The yield per consumer is just not as good. People dont pay much to watch animation. People pay a good bit to play games though.
Oop sorry seems these two seconds of your animation were claimed by vladimir turnipkosvsky's ten subscriber channel most of that 500,000 views money is going to him.
In terms of the art/animation itself, it's because there's a higher "budget floor" since the average animation framerate requires about 500 images per minute, which adds up damn quick if you're planning on an animation longer than 60 seconds.
In indie games, it's a lot easier to reuse animations. You can reuse the same three attack animations the whole game, or you can loop the same walk/run animations the whole game. Have a fight with 10 guys? Just copy the same guy 10 times. Want to fight an army of a thousand? Copy him 1000 times (and stagger their appearance so they don't melt the PC, of course.)
Engagement, cost of production is one thing, but engagement is another.
People pay tops what, 20 dollars for a movie ticket? That's even being generous. Unless they go to some gimmick theatre that offers an experience.
Blu-rays, people will pay 10-20 for a movie, wait for it on sale to own the ability to play it again and again.
Indie games still have gameplay you engage with. Animation you watch will never have that same engagement, you're watching it. Videogames you're controlling it, in whatever way it's set up to navigate through the story rather than ride through the story.
People are willing to pay for an experience they hadn't had before that they can engage with. Indie games can offer that, it's a lot harder for indie animation to offer something you can't get watching a higher budget project that pulls it off better and longer.
Videogames are also just exponentially more popular than animation is.
Animation in the mainstream honestly still gets looked at as if it's for kids. You're going to have trouble finding as much of a market. Of course there's adult animation and those are popular, but like you say, when you go that route, it's kind of hard to offer something that a bigger isn't going to do better.
A lot of what people are impressed by are production values rather than the content. If you have an epic score, voice acting and consistent animation, people will be impressed. But it's harder to compare to big budget studios in that regard
>it's a lot harder for indie animation to offer something you can't get watching a higher budget project that pulls it off better and longer.
You're saying that as if that couldn't apply to most indie games as well.
>you can't get watching a higher budget project that pulls it off better and longer.
haven't seen any mainstream modern comedic adult animation that looks/moves as good as vivzie's stuff, maybe outside of some obscure european movies
is vivzie's stuff still considered indie? I'd imagine budgets grew quite high and they're going to be on Amazon Prime soon.
I genuinely have no clue though
>Majority of the animators and background artists did it for free
Shit, really? Why? I can get believing in a project, but animators generally hate working for free especially across a long special
Networking and an oppurtunity to add a big name project to your resume and portfolio, The industry to pretty cutthroat and there are only so many oppurtunities, especially with major animation studios such as CN scaling down if no being closed downright. I love animation and hope to be good enough to be at a professional level someday but I can't imagine relying on it for income.
5 months ago
Anonymous
>Networking and an oppurtunity to add a big name project to your resume and portfolio,
Aren't those the exact things that get mocked by artists when a potential employer presents them with those as incentives?
I guess the comic explains it better than I could
[...]
She dumped them, didn't she?
, but I thought generally they were very against it since it seems exploitive so I'm surprised they worked on Helluva for free
Networking and an oppurtunity to add a big name project to your resume and portfolio, The industry to pretty cutthroat and there are only so many oppurtunities, especially with major animation studios such as CN scaling down if no being closed downright. I love animation and hope to be good enough to be at a professional level someday but I can't imagine relying on it for income.
Damn, you're telling me a studio can eliminate three quarters of their shows' costs by replacing animators with AI? No wonder they're trying so hard to get it working.
For me, animation quality/art direction is to cartoons what gameplay is to games. You can have the crappiest character writing or plot imaginable, and a majority of animation does, but if I like the art direction and/or the animation then frick the former aspects. It's not like I'm reading a novel, after all.
Reading a bunch of useless NEETs complain about Zeurel's budget is funny. Even moreso when they think they're qualified to discuss topics like finance and balancing a budget. If you didn't read the price tag on hot pockets you wouldn't know things cost money at all. Get the frick out.
The causes are pretty much the same at the end however: those that made it big had plenty of help to make it so.
Networking and an oppurtunity to add a big name project to your resume and portfolio, The industry to pretty cutthroat and there are only so many oppurtunities, especially with major animation studios such as CN scaling down if no being closed downright. I love animation and hope to be good enough to be at a professional level someday but I can't imagine relying on it for income.
>but I can't imagine relying on it for income.
I think both it and gamedev should be purely a hobby for those without the necessary connections/resources.
Artists think they are worth 5 figure salaries when doing what every single 5 year old does. Even if they are not even employed and doing something on the side. They want $$$ coming in because they are alive.
Black person, most indie games fail hard. You get indie devs who are saved from destitution because someone like Sseth or Mandalore makes a video about them. But because there are no guarantees you sometimes get quirky one man projects that explode, like that Lethal Company thing. That was made by a barely adult furry who never saw it coming. The only clear example I know of an indie dev playing the market is that Choo Choo Charles dev, who purposefully made a game he knew would meme well, and then put in a lot of effort to make it go viral.
It's fascinating how quickly the preception of industry careers went from "omg your famous" to "these people abuse kids and indie projects are the future".
Indie has always been the ideal way to go, people used to take industry deals because they were worth the trade off. As the desire to make more “content” went up, the need to cost cut did as well, and suddenly things like royalties, marketing, sometimes being on the front page when your work got released went with it. Working in the industry is great to develop your skills and make connections for when you eventually go indie, but people are doing it more now since the the big corps aren’t making an effort to try and actually retain their talent.
>Networking and an oppurtunity to add a big name project to your resume and portfolio,
Aren't those the exact things that get mocked by artists when a potential employer presents them with those as incentives?
I guess the comic explains it better than I could [...], but I thought generally they were very against it since it seems exploitive so I'm surprised they worked on Helluva for free
That comic is more about small time commission work as a freelancer. You still have a paycheck, bonuses, etc when you work in the industry.
Money.
That’s it
Indie allows you to have absolute creative control and the rights to shop around your idea for merchandising and tie ins if people want to buy them, but you have to do a lot to make an indie project work especially if you’re working out of pocket.
Companies have money. They will pay you money to work and to buy your idea. You might get money afterwards via royalties, though again, that shit becomes increasingly difficult to get, but they simply have more money to offer than going indie your first time, and you need money to afford basic necessities like food and a roof. It’s the same reason people were taking the sweetheart deals Epic Games did a bit back despite their storefront being absolute ass to this day.
because cartoons are completely story-driven, and westerners can only make woke stories today whereas indie games dont need a certain concrete story and can curb woke shit
How hard would it be to get an indie animated movie into streaming?
I don't mean getting funding for it, just selling the rights to stream it or something like that after the movie is ready.
Quite a few indie game developers are actually backed by large publishers.
Dave the Diver was a big example being labeled indie even when the devs are a subsidiary of Nexon, which has almost a billion dollars in income in 2021.
No I meant the section about the rough and clean sketches. If you already have Flash on your PC, how would it cost money to draw thousands of dollars for a indie project
Animation is tedious, not hard. If you dont have five breaks per shift and you arent dicking around on discord you should be getting a lot more done in a day
Well, 60 seconds times 12 FPS (animating on twos) is 720 frames.
Monkey Wrench is animated frame by frame mostly, but let's say they only need 200 unique drawings for those 720 frames, either with tweening, stills, or lower framerates.
If it's $1250 for those 200 drawings, the artist is getting $6.25 per rough sketch.
Let's say an animator can draw a frame in 15 minutes on average. That would be $25 per hour, but ONLY when they're actively working. There's no such thing as pooping on company time here.
These animators are freelancers, so that $25 per hour also needs to cover the costs of health insurance, taxes, equipment, and living during the inevitable work drought once the job's over.
For comparison, I'm a junior software engineer at a large company. My salary averages out to around $60 per hour plus benefits and stock, and I'm barely competent. I certainly don't draw a rough frame every 7 minutes for that $60.
>Animation is ultimately sold to platforms or advertisers
well it's more complicated than that, especially with indie shows adopting a funding model of selling merch direct to the consumer
>Developers make money on sales of the game.
Depend on how much of a cut any third-party entities who helped publish the game (if any) takes for themselves.
The problem is distribution. Originally you needed to sell your soul to a big company to screen your film now you need to sell your soul to a big company to stream your film.
Past that you can't viral market a film because when someone watches your movie and "reacts" to it, the person watching the influencer who watched your film already essentially saw your film. Your only other option is to strike the influencer for copyright which angers the influencer's fan base.
It's just a bad situation all around unless someone comes out with some really innovative distribution platform for independent films that can capture the attention of the average consumer.
>which angers the influencer's fan base.
That implies most film companies give a shit about the feelings of who's mostly a bunch of randies. I mean, we're not talking Pewdiepie or Cr1tikal here.
Pathetic. And you wonder why nobody cares about your "suffering" industry
undertale didn't get big because of the gameplay though
it got big because of the writing and music
It came directly out of Homestuck and was riding the wave of enthusiasm of what was coming out of that project. But that died off gradually because in 2014 I went into isolation because the homestuck Community abused me for being a Catholic while my best friend was working on it.
Keep your animation writer nonsense to yourself, you people abused me enough when I was a minor in the animation community, don't need to lie about my story too
Boil you can prowl around here for decades telling people to commit suicide and it won't make anyone like you one iota and calling my emails "breaking down" won't stop me from punishing you by sending them or dampen my conviction to send them.
You're the dip shit fruit of the animation industry showing it needs to die.
indieslop is easy when the hardest work has already been done with free engines and you're using past gen graphics, plus a devoted following of morons to give you the benefit of the doubt because you're the little guy making cute indie games and sticking it to the big AAA anti-art corpos
meanwhile AI gays want to turn animation into another assembly line shit they can exploit for a quick buck.
I'll let the common https://Cinemaphile.org/vg/agdg demoralisation post speak for itself:
>40 to 60 games release on Steam alone EACH DAY. >About 350 games in the week around your release. >AAA release? Successful release AAA or indie, in your genre? BOOM you are done. >Also, not only are you competing with other new releases, but the entire backlog of games on every system a player owns. 🙂
>Take all the "indie success stories" you can think of in the past 10 years and divide it by the number of devs in that time who have tried (again, 50 games a day, 1500 a month) and there's your historical likelihood of "making it."
>Steam cut, higher self-employment taxes, no benefits, no retirement, AND to top it all off: Your sales diminish over time, so even if you hit this "mediocrity lottery" you'll have to do it all over again in a couple years.
Not only this, but the medium is FULL to the brim with publisher frickheads like David Szymanski larping as indie and taking all the attention away from the actual starving artists. The game awards this year ignored fantastic stuff like Pizza Tower in favour of games published by huge companies such as Nexon. If you don't pay literally $100,000+ per trailer at events like TGAs then you will get deliberately ignored by the entire industry, and likely join the piles of buried games on steam with 20 sales ever.
Some of my favourite games of all time only made around $2,000 because that's just how fricked gamedev is for indies.
Meanwhile, it seems like every single animation on youtube gets crazy success. ENA episodes must be child's play to make compared to making an actual game, which is why their videogame "ENA: Dream BBQ" is taking fricking forever to make and delaying their regular animation uploads despite the fact that the regular episodes seem very similar to a game, and intuitively feel like they should easily translate to a game.
Basically every youtuber that tries to get into gamedev crashes and burns.
The only reason animation is even viable right now is because youtube pays you some money for millions of views. But youtube is floundering enough to attack adblock users after almost 20 years of operation. I think they've actually always been operating at a loss but since google bought them out they're just trying to retain video platform supremacy. The second YouTube stops payout, indie animation will tank. Which they've already been trying to cut back on by tightening their terms of use and cracking down on monetization privileges. I don't know where animators will turn. Merch is harder to sell, patreon maybe if you can churn out new stuff every day/week to satisfy subscribers. No clue but for all the problems games have, animation is really hanging by a thread itself
People don't buy cartoons like they buy games, simple as. The smart route is publishing houses commissioning cartoons for their graphic novels which, does actually work and people do buy in droves. But that kind of investment involves a little risk and Americucks don't like that.
Indie animators tend to be queer girls with wonky-ass lesbian/gay ideas that nobody really wants, so mainstream success is low. Indie game producers are 99% MEN, far more normal, and as opposed to giving people their internalized crap as girls do and demanding they like it, they produce things other men, the core demographic for games, might actually want to consume..
>Indie animators tend to be queer girls with wonky-ass lesbian/gay ideas that nobody really wants
I dunno dude even their stuff can have have silver linings even most of the big indie games lack.
I think the thing Zuerel sucks at the most is the marketing side of his series. >People clamor about wanting plushies of the black cat, the most popular monkey Wrench character >Use black cat as marketing stunt to sell plushies of the two ugly MCs >When finally time to make plushie of the cat, pair him with another character instead of just by himself >Now struggles to sell plushies of the most popular character because he baited people too long and put him alongside a character no one cares about.
10 dollars to play an indie game
Three advertisements (or zero :^) at less than one cent to watch an indie animation
Support indie patreons if you have the money and the desire.
Consider that most people who watch indie animation on youtube will watch several series from several different youtubers in a day. For most games, people buy one game and then expect it to entertain them for over a week, often leaving a negative review (that deboosts your games visibility) if it doesn't give them the 50 hours of gameplay they wanted. In that time, they could've watched 150 animation pilots. Now you see why you're far more likely to attain success as an animator, so so so many more people are giving you a shot on a daily basis. And there are far less quality animations on youtube than there is demand, whereas there are too many fantastic games to ever finish in your lifetime, so it's a competition to be seen more than all the other perfectly great games that overfill the demand.
I see. Shame the thread is dying, thanks for the discussion
Yeah, it's annoying that you can't really "extend" threads without making a new one and having everyone call you a moron for it, if only you could keep them alive for longer.
Animation is expensive
So's programing
Not to the same degree
I can animate
I can't program
I'm the opppsite
It is depending on the game.
Games sometimes require animation on top of everything else.
Depends on the game, it's not always that simple. Honestly if you're making a moderately complex indie game, it's a shitload of work. Programming is just part of it, you also need to create all the assets and playtest/polish everything. Not saying it's harder than animating a cartoon, they're both hard things to do well.
once you get the base gameplay loop you can stop writing code moron
>gameplay loop
A lot of the code in games is made by ai these days. Being a code monkey is useless unless you're actually making something original and not derivative.
You reminded me of a convo I had with my dorm roommate.
>be me
>3rd year compsci student
>making a simple game in unity as a group project
>roommate sees me working on it
>"why didn't you ask ChatGPT to make the game for you, anon?"
>"that won't work because a game is too complex for it"
>"but have you tried tho? you can't know it you didn't try at least."
>fml
People these days really don’t seem to understand that learning a skill that’s been “automated” one way or another is still worth doing if you’re generally interested in it, it’s fricking annoying. Art, coding, even shit like cooking and sewing. Sometimes you just wants to learn shit because you want to learn shit, not fricking everything needs to be about the grind and shitting slop out fast via Amazon dropshipping or Fivver or whatever the frick.
>why didn't you ask ChatGPT to make the game for you, anon?
Why tho? Most gamedevs use ChatGPT nowadays kek.
I do and not just for gamedev, but it isn't some omnipotent tool that can make whatever I ask of it. The code it generates sometimes doesn't do what I want, does it in a way it is not fit for me (per example, uses a wrong design pattern) or is straight up faulty. Sometimes it even refuses to generate code if I ask it too complex of a task. So yeah, it would be nice if it could generate more complex things (it would make my job a lot easier), but realistically it is only good at explaining concepts and generating boilerplate, everything else is hit or miss (for now at least).
But have you tried?
>ask chat gpt "code minecraft with breasts"
>sell game
>become gorillionaire
>mfw
Couldn't even get an after effects script to work right. it's a bullshit machine fronting basic shit masked in word salad lies.
Yes because Chad thunder wiener from management is going to have simp Goldstien from accounting to check the code and put your stack overflow pasting ass on floor duty.
Ok, show me an example of a game coded 100% by ai.
You can make game code with AI? Where is this magical technology I want it
>write bullshit
>no source
>people here believe it
I am tired.
It's one anon replying to themselves.
Way easier for a sole programmer to program an engine than a sole artist to draw several thousand frames of animation.
Programing can also be done with easy to acquire software, and half the time they can just steal code. It's easier done in much less time by fewer people.
Animation requires insanely expensive software. Loads of unique skill in not just knowing how to animate, but also timing, and getting the movements correct and looking normal. While also being much much more time consuming.
>Animation requires insanely expensive software
Pen and Paper?
show me the movie that is made on pen and paper
But since you think you are being clever and somehow not moronic. Hand drawn animation then requires massively expensive equipment like table cameras, peg boards so everything is drawn exactly right and it is not wobbly and all over the place, cells, paint, background art drawn separately on separate cells. An even different skill in timing charts to make sure that everything moves where it should and when correctly, and the whole crew needs to learn them and be able to read them.
Then waste much much more time painting individual cells by hand, then filming every single one of them by hand. Going back and reviewing the film for errors, and if there is one, retiming and re filming all of them again in order one by one.
It would save them tens of thousands to go get Toon Boom Harmony and a cintiq instead.
Blender is free and a drawing tablet is cheaper than a license for Gamestudio. Fricking jesus christ it isn't expensive to animate. You homosexuals also seem to forget that the frickint indie game studios also fricking animate!
The difference is i actually know how much it costs and you are a fricking moron trying to pretend you know things.
And everything you said is still wrong by the way.
Bullshit moron. You're making shit up and claiming anyone saying otherwise is the liar. Animating isn't expensive just because some of the tools are. And once again indie game studios require animations so it's not that fricking hard or expensive to animate.
Well that's only because. You. Are. Lying
>Game maker studio license
$99.99
>Cheap drawing tablet
$50
Now shut the frick up
>Numbers pulled out of your ass
How about showing me exactly where and what items one has to buy with links first or else you are still lying your ass off.
I'm curious what amazing animated stuff one can make on a shitty little 5x5" screenless aliexpress tablet. I'm sure all of it will be impeccable professional quality that will land them $$$ and gigs from every studio out there.
There are definitely big name artists that got started on a Bamboo but they inevitably upgrade to a screened tablet before they're at the level of getting on as animators somewhere. Hell, most of the newgrounds crew started on dumb tablets.
I think anon is pointing out that just you are a liar.
So, how does this work with the earlier pen and paper argument? What you are listing is still hundreds to a thousand dollars, on top of needing a computer to run it all. Not exactly pen and paper. It still requires specialized equipment and specialized talent.
>needing a computer to run it all.
That argument goes out the window when programming also requires a computer doesn't it?
okay so, not pen and paper is the only requirement?
Yeah sure if you think people can make a living off selling flipbooks. Or if there is such thing as an audience that gives a shit about them.
>Animation requires insanely expensive software
Procreate Dreams is 20 bucks. The issue is that you have to draw a lot. A game, even one with a huge art focus like Hollow Knight or Cuphead, can reuse assets way more easily than animation can.
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Here's a professional animator making a three-second gif of Trevor from Castlevania doing a cool ship move. It's not colored and there's no background, and it took four hours.
yeah that's why you save that level of animation for special occasions like every tv series ever made
One of the most addicting games ever made that people will play for weeks can be made by one dude in fricking Excel.
Yeah and a guy made an entire animated movie in Microsoft Office
Nobody who isn’t mentally impaired likes this shit, though. Huge asterisk there.
programming a game requires animation
Making a game isn't real programming unless you make your own engine
I made this in C without any engine with Vulkan about 5 months just dicking around. Animation is way more time consuming for a single person
And if you want to do a complete 2D game there are a ton of engines and even coding one from scratch isn't too hard. The real time-consuming part is creating all those assets for your game rather than the coding.
cool but this and the i3 desktop i conclude that you wasted your time Black person
>i3
dwm b***h
RWBY just depresses me
Artists
Programming isn't as expensive unless it's something for a business use
Programming is not what makes game dev expensive. It does add up though.
Writing code is difficult, but it takes less physical time to do.
If you know exactly what you want a program to do, it will probably take a few hours to write it all.
Even if you know exactly what you want your scene to look like, it will still take days to draw it.
>Writing code is difficult, but it takes less physical time to do.
Depends on how simple enough the language is to get a hold of it after some time. I mean, GML is much easier to grasp than say, C++ for instance, and even both are easier to get a grasp of in comparison to say, ASM.
so animators should be RICH right?
Is less about the price and more about having a stable platform to grow
Indie game devs have platforms like Steam or Itch.io were they can publish their stuff and safely get a earn out of it.
Animators don't really have that safe bet, Youtube's algorithm hates every channel that doesn't upload consistenly and Newgrounds hasn't been relevant in a very long time.
>Newgrounds hasn't been relevant in a very long time.
>She doesn't know about the Newgrounds revival
No, Ninjamuffin, FNF blowing up in popularity didn't do jackshit to Newrgrounds, now get out of the thread and work on your damn game
He recently got cancelled for liking sexual drawings of underage anime girls. People twisted it into claims that he flat out watches child pornography.
I thought it was a picture of Hatsune Miku
I don't even know anymore man. I spent nearly 20 minutes trying to figure out what the frick was going on, because people from Twitter were spamming shitty memes and shitty jokes about the situation without being clear of the context.
I hate what the internet has become.
I remember part of the accusations being he draws his characters small and stumpy because he is a pedo catering to his fetish.
I didn't see that but I believe you. Others were calling him a pedophile and a child predator and other nonsense.
It just gets me depressed when so many people react this way over literally fricking nothing and make frivilous claims that can easily ruin someone's reputation and career.
I took a look last night and the guy has favorited art of "aged up minors" drawn by popular NG artists on his NG account. Who the frick cares and why are they going after him and not the artists who drew that art themselves? Newgrounds is basically a porn site.
This is just what happens when the majority of your fanbase is probably 14-17 year olds. They don't understand NG is an adult website and FNF is an adult game that has a cutesy art style. They look up to any random homosexual programmer/artist/musician who's attached to a project like an idol and then are shocked to find out that adult men making drawings of cartoons like pornography of cartoon characters.
It's literally nothing and this shit will blow over in a few weeks.
If they had a problem with that art, why aren't they calling out the people who made the art in the first place as well?
Like everyone, I was a teenager once and I considered myself stupid, but me and everyone else I knew weren't this fricking insufferable 15 years ago. People say that teenagers are just being teenagers, but something has changed since then to make them even worse than I could've ever dreamed of.
>People say that teenagers are just being teenagers, but something has changed since then to make them even worse than I could've ever dreamed of.
it's always been like this anon, we just weren't as aware of it because the internet wasn't widespread yet
Things weren't like this back then because the internet wasn't the final frontier of society, that decides your future and how you'll live.
So why hasn't anyone tried hosting an itch.io equivalent for indie animations instead of relying on YouTube who will not only cuck them out of viewership but of payment too?
Web hosting servers are cheaper than ever these days. Get a few indie animators in on it and advertise it via word of mouth, take a small percentage for site hosting costs (far less than what YouTube would otherwise extort from content creators), and there we go. A good platform for animators and their animations.
Places like Newgrounds and Deviantart have way too much overlap; nobody goes to either of those to watch animations anymore. So a dedicated place would be ideal.
You could use itch or gumroad to upload a paid animation, the problem is no one would pay for a animation. With games it's expected with animation it's only expected if it's porn. hell you can't even give animations away. Let's say you make some Youtube alternative and it's free but only allow animations, if it somehow got many viewers you still need to pay for the bandwidth, with the same shitty ads that youtube uses. Maybe it would work if you needed a membership to view the animations, and it had porn animations as well, then you pay the animators by how much their content was viewed but still not going to give non-porn animators very much money.
I think you are overestimating the sheer number of indie games being made, of course you will see more lottery winners if there are enough gamblers. Making a hit animation is harder than making a modestly successful game which can be more lucrative than most hit animations, from ad revenue alone.
>So why hasn't anyone tried hosting an itch.io equivalent for indie animations instead of relying on YouTube who will not only cuck them out of viewership but of payment too?
Because then how do you expose said site, and how do the animators profit without angering the general populace? Because even 5 dollars a month per animator will start to empty wallets too quick for most people.
Going back at this, it also has to do on how expensive animation tools are compared to indie dev tools
things like RPGMaker, Clickteam or Gamemaker are one time purchase 20 dollars, tops, or even open source engines, like Unity or UE
Animation tools like Harmony or Animate rely on a monthly paid subscription of 40 dollars, and the one time purchase is nearly on the 1000, sure, there's Blender, but that's CGI
anon you don't need high end animation tools to do 2d animation, there's tons of programs from krita to opentoonz that are free
even in more niche fields like stop motion the top-of-the-line software is dragonframe and that's only $300 for a perpetual license
If Keke can be one of the best animators with fricking flipnote, tools are no obstacles.
(also Blender can do 2d)
Unity and UE are free until you reach a income threshold but are not open source. A GameMaker license is $99 and RPGMaker is around $70. As the other anon said Blender can do 2D as well and there are actual open source animation software's, which function just as well, as animation is more reliant on you own skill rather than experience with a particular tool or engine like game dev. A skilled animator could make a good animation in flash, krita, blender grease pencil or Toonboom, where as a good programmer would still need to learn each engine and the open source alternatives for game dev like Godot, can't even import .OBJ files and lack features that other game engines have had for a decade prior. Also unless you are making pixelshit, either one is going to require a drawing tablet.
Animation is expensive and economics is more likely to reward things done cheaply and quickly.
>Animation is expensive
So why are animators making pennies?
The same reason why dishwashers in restaurants are some of the lowest paid positions in the field despite their importance.
They're at the bottom. Simple as.
Animators are the guys doing the actual labor. They are the guys actually installing the plumbing in the building, or laying down the tile. while the supervisor in the trailer outside makes double their salary, the next manager above them in the office downtown make triple that guy's salary, and the suit on the top floor makes that same amount in an afternoon.
Animators are the labor force that make the smallest amount in the process.
Stop noticing things!
Just outsource it to CIS countries. They will cost 5 times less than Westerners yet will have just 20% worse quality average.
Game development. Even indie game development. Is expensive too.
The problem is not the budgets. It's the platforms and the broader consumer relationship towards the medium.
It's expensive because people need money to eat and pay rent.
It's not until you get into the workforce and have to pay bills that you also realize that 39k for a year's salary is pathetic unless you live in Methville, Alabama, to say nothing of the fact that self-employment taxes is sure to take at least a few thousand from you by year's end. Or even imagine that money is split up 3 ways, basically 3 measly part-time jobs.
You're basically paying so that someone can spend the productive hours during the day animating as opposed to working a day job and trying to muster enough energy to spend 2-3 hours max at night animating, if you don't pass out after work (or have to cook, take care of kids, etc.).
There is a happy medium between cheap Methlandia and the expensive open air homeless encampments somewhere
>It's not until you get into the workforce and have to pay bills that you also realize that 39k for a year's salary is pathetic unless you live in Methville, Alabama
>TFW 20 dollars an hour 10 years ago was enough to live comfortably in a one bedroom in a nice area.
>20 dollars an hour now means you're just barely getting by in a studio apartment or condo in a bad area and still need a part time job if you want to have fun
>Most places don't even want to give 20 an hour and keep you around 17-18 tops, just out of reach.
>Most college degrees are now worthless without nepotism to back them up
Living in a clown world.
Of course the tranime poster has a moronic wrong opinion
Anime website
>20 dollars an hour now means you're just barely getting by in a studio apartment or condo in a bad area and still need a part time job if you want to have fun
I have several New York friends that live in actual houses and can afford to pay for things and they make roughly 20-25 an hour from the jobs they have and they don't even have to work 12+ hours a day
The economy is fricked yes, but at this point I just think people on the whole just have moronic spending habits and don't know how to save money and don't want to admit that
>I have several New York friends that live in actual houses and can afford to pay for things and they make roughly 20-25 an hour from the jobs they have and they don't even have to work 12+ hours a day
And I assume all those friends are living in the same house, that's the only way you'd be able to afford that in New York at $20-$25 an hour.
No, they all either live by themselves or are married and it's just them
Again stop coping over your poor spending habits anon
$25 an hour on 40 hour work week comes out to $52,000 a year. After tax, that’s about 45,000. I think you’d be hard pressed to find anywhere in the city where you can comfortably live alone for much less than 2K a month, unless you’re living in deep Jersey city or past flushing. So at that point, you coughing up about half your income to rent. I’m not saying you can’t get by on the other $21,000 for all your non-rent expenses, but it’s no comfy existence.
Lots of people get by Warehouse work where the pay is even less unless if you work 60 hours
I got an offer to move to NYC a few weeks ago and they wanted to pay me $37,000/yr ($17/hr). I checked rent in the area and found that as a single person moving there alone I'd have $600/mo to cover all personal expenses, health insurance, car insurance, groceries, utilities, etc. Absolutely no chance of ever doing something other than renting.
$600 USD ain't that bad wtf are you on?
NYC is unlivable unless you are pulling in at the very least $65K and that is not well.
Also you won't have that car with insurance either. No building has space to park it and parking spaces in the city go around $200-$400 a month, and driving is a fricking nightmare.
Also the city recently implemented that congestion pricing BS which makes it even LESS appealing to want a car in NYC.
>NYC is unlivable unless you are pulling in at the very least $65K and that is not well.
as someone who actually lives there, no that's not true at all
Obviously if you wanna live on the Upper East side or Midtown yes that shit is expensive but you can still afford a decent place by yourself as long as you're not moronic with your money
Giving people more money is what lead everything to be inflated.
Dumbass.
just burn 1(one) billionaire's wealth to ash in order to deflate the economic eco system, simple as
Billionaires have rights too, libby. Just because you chose to spend your youth smoking pot and playing videogames doesn't mean he deserves to have his money stolen.
>israelite worshiper
cry harder, poorBlack person
>Billionaires have rights too
Not the pedophile ones. Execute them and their money.
>Why is it so hard for indie animation to make money compared to indie games?
Well anon...
Tpbp
artists have big egos
Anyone who makes something for someone else has to have an ego, because at some point you say "I'm good enough that other people will clearly enjoy looking at my work."
An artist that scribbles for themselves only is humble but no one even knows they exist. Which is fine, but I think anons don't really understand motivation or psychology very much.
He's probably just basing it off of a standard industry rate/how much salary he'd like to be making.
>bears shit in the woods
How does it cost that much for a single second of animation? Especially if he's doing most of it himself?
Commissioning a freelance artist for a static image already costs like 80-100$ on average. Imagine having a professional do it 1000 times
anon 1 second of animation is 12 drawings if you are animating in 2s let's say 6 drawings if you are doing something really cheap, are you even able to make a sketch in an hour anon? Moreover they are freelancers, thus taxes and is an high skill job. Remember that a plumber could charge you 100$ an hour just to check some pipes
again, that's why you don't do full animation
sure, animating on twos means twelve drawings a second - but who said you had to draw the whole character again for each of those drawings?
Let's see
>Animation is more niche in the west compared to games
>The payment process for indie games are fundamentally more beneficial than animation
>Ad based Payment < Direct Pay
>Youtube cut > Steam's Cut
Gaming being more popular than animation bugs me because what if the video game has a cartoony artstyle? Is Cuphead a niche game?
It's not the style it's the engagement and hours of entertainment per dollar.
normalgays are to moronic to realize that games (and MCU movies) ARE animation
People play games that have no animation, shut up.
All games have animation with the only exceptions being text based adventure games.
We're not talking about Monopoly here moron.
People are still more likely to play a game that takes a lot from cartoon than actually watch them. The gaming community is just much more strong than the general animation community. The size of both are just not comparable.
I'd be more sympathetic to Zeurel but I remember watching one of his streams shortly after he did some clout chasing animation for a youtuber and he was complaining that people didn't care about his works until he did the clout chasing thing.
Like why would to make something to get people's attention then b***h at them for not watching his stuff before? Strange man.
Unless an artist's work sucks it's probably best to look the other way when he/she spergs out on a massive copium binge.
>a youtuber
the swede and the italian?
I think so, one of the cartoons had a bald guy wearing a swedish viking hat.
I can understand it a bit. You make a small animation for a streamer you like and get a big fountain of praise and likes which makes you feel popular and gives you the false assumption that when you make a project which requires so much time and effort, people would want to watch that too.
Monkey Wrench has always been a bit eh. Its obviously Zeu's passion project and its clear there is a small group of people who enjoy it too, but when he sees how many people like his dumb Joel animation compared to his thing, I can assume he gets a bit jealous.
Animation has to look good or it is terrible.
Videogames only need good gameplay,
some guy can make a game by themselves in 3 months a indie animator can only make a 30 second video in same amount of time, basically it's not the same fricking thing mate so the comparison is ridiculous
A single $40k-ish episode doesn't sell to tens of thousands for $10-$20.
AI can solve many of those
Not really.
yep!
Boringgay
To play a indie game you have to buy it (in before someone says piracy like an unfunny newbie) so you can easily price your game based on how much you generally spent making it and other such economic factors and despite everything people accept this form of payment.
Meanwhile indie animation just puts it on YouTube for free. There isn't a way to montinize videos really outside of merch and patreon subs, and trying to do something like charge a ticket fee to watch ends up getting a ton of backlash because for some reason people expect videos to be free and to get their money from ads.
This, but on the other hand it's much easier to get people to watch your 10 minute animation than it is to get them to commit to a 5 hour minimum game
You know who many people buy shit tons of games in every steam sale and then never play them. You can buy a indie game and never play it and the creator will get your money anyways.
> (in before someone says piracy like an unfunny newbie)
TORRENT ME HEARTIES YO HO!
Shows are not products. They do not make money directly off the market, they make money off people using them to garner interest for real products.
How to make money with a video game:
> make something
> people buy it
How to make money with animation:
> make something
> people watch it for free
> some corporate gangbang of advertisers, ad networks, and YouTube eventually give you money for ads they watched while watching your thing.
> it's not enough money to wipe your ass
> beg for funding from people who already got what they wanted for the promise of getting another thing via Patreon or Kickstarter
> repeat for every episode of your thing
/thread. The time investment is pretty much equivalent, but games at least have the chance to make beyond ROI and you only need to get over the hurdle of getting it on shelves or a storefront.
Animation, movies and TV are all much easier to access, but you’re way more dependent on the teat of advertisers and distributors to get it really seen by people who matter and who can give your project money beyond crowdfunding.
Supporting point: Whats the Vampire Survivors of animation?
Animation is not a popular as video games, duh.
IIRC video games have overtaken all of film media as the single biggest entertainment market on Earth.
Fricking zoomers
>music and sound design
>$11,000
What the frick? You can get music for cheap from smalltime SoundCloud gays and you can do sound design yourself if you just took a couple hours to learn audacity
Are there any good tutorials or something about how to learn sound design? I'm honestly really confused by the whole thing
I don't know, it's always been intuitive for me. The only thing I had to learn was audacity and similar software. Sound design is various sfx of items, background ambience, sounds getting louder as they approach, quieter far away, music swelling or fading out or pausing, footsteps, echoes, crunching leaves, futuristic beeps and buzzes, whatever. Just think about what sounds things make homie then think what environment they're in and whether they got reverb or are muffled or whatever. You can do it yourself easily layering royalty free audio clips on youtube. Or pay for a big sfx pack they're not expensive
I see, thanks anon
The FCC has radio and television by the throat. If they had known how big the internet was going to be you know damn well they'd have neutered it when they had the chance.
The problem is that so many indie projects go all out with the animation and other stuff when they don't need to.
I get he has standards, but the animation doesn't need to be as fluid as it is. You could have a stronger emphasis on keyframes which would also cut down on the animatic costs. Lower the frame rate. Music doesn't need to be playing at every scene and he may have even overpaid the voice actors. Reuse background shots more and lower the amount of camera angles used.
He needs to be smarter with his money, and he can still get the kind of story told that he wants. After all, this is INDIE animation, not something backed by a large studio.
Unpopular opinion but 24fps looks better for animation. The lack of frames forces you to get creative with how you depict your motion between them. Super fluid motion is a meme and one reason I don't like mainstream cgi as much as 2d. Borrow from what anime does and use more stills with minimal animation in them between the action segments. It's a huge money saver along with dialogue over some panning shots of the setting. A lot of animators learn a certain way of animating that might look stylish but it's not feasible in a big project. Even with all the money anime makes they still can't recreate the same level of animation that 90's OVAs used. Not a realistic standard.
Super fluid is fun imo but it's completely unnecessary for anything but theatrical movies. And it's not the only way as you said, to get animation looking nice or effective.
I get it's his passion project but he's clearly getting upset at how much money it's taking to get episodes done. He can reach a compromise that most people would be happy with and still tell the stories he wants.
>Is producing a pilot with half the run time.
I agree, looks like a case of stubborn creator. Many such cases. I can only understand it if theres already success to maintain, but there's just not yet
>24fps looks better for animation
>implying full 24fps isn't the HIGHEST framerate any commercial animation outside of vidya will be
They're usually animated on twos as well.
I get your point, but the first sentence confused me. I think you meant to say 12fps is better for animation. Most everything, CGI included, is animated at 24 fps. It's only video games that get animated at 30/60 fps.
I will point out that a lot of animators add a lot of unnecessary fluidity because they want to add it to their portfolios. In the hopes of getting hired by a larger studio. Someone like Zuerel should really reel it back though, he's already proven himself capable of working for a studio.
This. Remember that Glitch Productions, probably the most successful indie Youtube animation studio at the moment, only does fairly low-budget CGI.
It might be a case of trying to show off his skills or maybe thinking people will be more likely to tune in if the animation is really high quality.
Animation rarely makes money period.
Animation has always been hard to monetize even for big studios.
But keep in mind most indie games don't make money either. 10,000 are released every year on steam alone and maybe 100 will make a profit.
Annoyingly so, animation does poorly based on everyone just viewing it as meaningless kiddy shit.
Advertisers do not want to bother paying for ad space against meaningless kiddy shit
Licensees do not want to attach their name to meaningless kiddy shit
Studios don't want to waste time and money on churning out meaningless kiddy shit
Everyone in any upper tier space that has the money, clout, and makes the decisions only wants their names attached to the super serious, hard-hitting drama, over the top action, big tent big titles and mega hits. Their personal opinion and personal bias comes into play. Which is why we have guys at the top saying things like
>Why make more kiddy shit when we can make LIVE ACTION Little Mermaid and Lion King for REAL Adults who frick!
Animation needs more unnecessary penises to catch up. Live action and video games are flooded with it.
You forgot the people who have the job of giving opinions on media, critics. They fricking loathe animation and also view it as dumb kid shit not worth their time.
Studios, executives, and advertisers do not want to put their money to something that will be panned by critics who will tel all audiences it is pure shit due to the fact that the animated movie is not Citizen Kane.
That's silly. Kids stuff is incredibly profitable due to toy sales. Power Rangers, Paw Patrol , Peppa Pig, Transformers... Disney built there empire in the 90s ON merch.
Toy sales declining due to internet stuff is a recent thing
Toy companies shifted who their target demographic is. Now all the toy based shows are preschool tier. Almost every preschool show had huge merch deals and whole aisles in toy sections of stores. Then there is that 6-15 gap where there is little except for the latest movie tie-ins at best and then it;s adult collectors stuff. They decided elementary and middle school age kids buy video games so they quit bothering and went for the younger kids and older collectors.
It's also why the toy section in Target is largely 80s MOTU, old TMNT, transformers, and other major 80s franchises rebooted or the 80s series remade and put back on shelves.
Most artists don't know how to manage money
Animation is really really time consuming.
really time consuming
It is not something you can do a little bit here and there for an hour or two at night or in your spare time. It's doing 10 or more hours in one day and that still only amounts to tiny minuscule elements of what you need made. Someone has to just outright dedicate full time effort to it if they want anything done in 6 months or less. So it basically has to be their job, not a side gig. Animators need to make animating into their sole source of income. If they are not getting paid to make it then they simply cannot make it.
Like others said, animation can be expensive and time consuming.
Which is fine if you are rich or have resources.
But if you don’t, then you have to make a product that people actually want. To watch on repeat, donate money, and buy plushies.
And Monkey Wrench is not something people want.
Creating your passion project is impressive and deserves some respect, but if your passion project is something no one likes then you should be ready to have to pay big time.
>And Monkey Wrench is not something people want.
why? What is something people actually want?
>What is something people actually want?
They want mime shill garbage like The Amazing Digital Circus.
>please support mediocre animation projects!
Frick off, I vote what I want to watch with my money and this project isn't worth of my money for how mediocre and conceptually dry it is
The psychology of the consumer varies from each type of media. People have been trained since cable TV to watch cartoons for free and youtube does the same. The only model that seems to work is to hope merch sales and patron donations will cover costs. Most people will just watch it for free and the pennies they make from adds will not make it worth it unless they are getting 10s of millions of views per episode. Meanwhile with games each person who consumes the product paid for it. People are used to paying for video games not so much with animated cartoons. You would have a better chance at getting someone to pay for a comic instead of an animated video. It's kind of fricked up but that's how it goes.
As a consumer I like free things, but the industry would probably be healthier if people actually paid for the entertainment they watched. Even a dollar might go a long way to making more of this stuff profitable.
The internet basically crumbled the entire video media landscape. We're in an inbetween period where everyone is still trying to figure out how to stabilize the profitability of internet media. I can see the future being essentially all patreon style online. Especially if twitter decides to become its own payment processor.
It's undermerchandized. If you can't even throw up a link to flog shirts you don't deserve to make money. You need to prostitute out your characters on as much merch as you can.
Because with animation you don’t have to buy the fricking product lmao. It’s all supposed to be free and paid for by some company’s commercials. What a bad spot for creators to be in
You really just need one thing for a good video game.
Gameplay.
Call it fun, call it engaging, call it impactful, whatever. You just need the gameplay to be good. Everything else can be shit. Take a look at Undertale, it sold hundreds of thousands and (objectively) looks terrible. Minecraft sold millions and looks/sounds like shit. But the core game is something that people enjoy playing, so they'll gladly shell out $10 for it.
Combine that with 10,000 sales and you have yourself a nice income, even after half of it disappears from storefront fees and taxes and such. One person could do well from that, and a team of three could do okay.
What do you need for a good animation? You need good design, good actual drawing, good animation between frames, good audio/sound, and good VAs. All those cost money and people. And you can rarely skimp out on them either; while you COULD get away with some being shit, you'd really need the other parts to be excellent for anyone to pay attention. Already your indie animation project is at double the people required for an indie video game project.
And unless everybody is fine with working for free, you kind of need funding up-front. A solo programmer could work on a video game in their free time, a solo animator can't exactly do the same if you want stuff like lipsync or storyboarding to be handled by someone else. Also, there's how pricing is handled. Most people expect to pay $10 to get a video game in exchange. Most people aren't going to spend $10 to get a 20-minute animated video, which means you want your funding up front. And it's harder to ask people for money for some future planned project instead of a current completed one.
In the case of both Undertale and Minecraft, their creators already had good enough connections within the communities they were in that helped prop up their games even higher than what attention the average indie game would usually get (in that period).
undertale didn't get big because of the gameplay though
it got big because of the writing and music
Nah it was the memes, the anthros and the music
>it got big because of the writing and music
This game has ONLY two songs which is megalovania made a decade prior and the Spongebob FUN song.
Cartoon: bad animation/characters/writing = bad show.
Game: bad animation/characters/writing can still be good if the gameplay is fun.
As this anon said
Use 3D models. Once they're made and rigged you can use them for fluid and very cheap animation.
Why can't you just record the game and make it into a cartoon?
>Game: bad animation/characters/writing can still be good if the gameplay is fun.
Depends on the genre. I'd be more scrutinous about the writing and/or characters if it were a more story-driven type like an RPG or an adventure game.
Baldur's Gate 3 is an RPG with a story that falls apart in Act 3 but people love it because the combat is fun.
I went into Destiny 1 completely blind. Liked the gameplay and was confused why everyone was online crying about, "muh story, why is there a big golfball and why are we fighting aliens?"
Games are bought for 5 to 20 dollars per sale, animations aren't paid for 99% of the time. Instead they are just put out for free, and must either get enough millions of views to become profitable through ads or inspire enough people to willingly donate money to the artist.
This means that an animator must be really popular to get any real amount of money from his work, where as a game dev will get money even if they only sell 200 copies
Its funny how some "critics" say that some old cartoons are "glorified toy commercials", but no shit that's how they make money so that shit like OP doesn't happen.
Why don't they learn to do drawn out panning padding shots like anime?
I think the biggest issue is that indie animators have no platform to go to without getting fricked over (IE forced to give up the rights to their creation). Indie games can reliably get on Steam pretty easily without the devs getting a raw deal, with one such title, Lethal Company, being able to outsell the new Call of Duty when it came out to boot.
why not cut down the cost of the animation? Use some techniques to make it more limited but appealing
>why not cut down the cost of the animation? Use some techniques to make it more limited but appealing
Bitches will say this but will be the first to complain about "flash animation", long still images or choppy frames
well I did say you still have to make it appealing anon. Though I don't like flash in general, fosters home looks much more appealing than johnny test despite using flash, and you can still make good hand drawn animation with lesser frame count if you're smart.
The only thing people genuinely hate is rigging and rig tweening
Do people really hate rigging? I think it can look really good (Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure, Hilda and Wander over Yonder) were all done by the same studio and it looks incredible. I would have t thought rigged animation could be a benefit to those who don’t want to shell out $80k for hand drawn animation for every single episode after.
>Do people really hate rigging?
Yeah people think it's soulless since it's not hand drawn cel animation.
Aw that sucks, I think it’s really fun. Centaurworld especially has some fantastic rig work from Mercury Filmworks
Yes. Because it limits what you can really do artistically. Eventually people catch on that every cartoon they watch is shot from eye level because you can't move orbitally around a 2d puppet. Many studios have started integrating a mix of rigs and hand drawn because rigs alone just suck. It's one reason everyone flocks to anime. As they take great pride in interesting and engaging shot composition and "camera" work. But that shit costs a frickton
Indie games often can't do those interesting angles because of how they work (2d sprites usually) but people don't mind it.
Also, shows like TV sitcoms have limitations like always filming the set from the same angles and people still watch them without problem.
Yet again, why do animation fans care so much?
People don't mind sprites because of the interactivity aspect. If you had no control over the sprite and just had to sit and watch it, nobody would.
As for sitcoms, comedy always sells in any form. A laugh outweighs people's visual interest. We're not talking comedy when I say "people hate rigging."
Comedy makes you laugh
Videos games let you decide the fate of the character
Animation outside of these things needs visual stimulation to succeed
>Many studios have started integrating a mix of rigs and hand drawn because rigs alone just suck
i thought that was always how it was done?
I mean they hand draw the rigs I guess, before asset dropping them into a background layer. But I mean frame by frame. What part of Johnny Test was hand drawn frame by frame? The mid 00's flash shit was garbage from a toilet bad
>What part of Johnny Test was hand drawn frame by frame?
The first season, which was produced in the US.
Half of most 2D shows are hand-drawn in Korea, which has been the case for decades.
That's interesting.
So if it's all hand drawn, does that mean there are no rigs whatsoever?
Also I posted those shows but they were just an example, I'd guess the same about Amphibia, Owl house, Hilda etc. But again, I'm probably off.
If these are all hand drawn, then how come the animation itself looks so basic and sort of stiff? Earlier hand drawn game trailers got mentioned, when I watch them they flow much better and seem to have more weight behind movement. I get it's different when you're animating 22 minute episodes, but how come all these shows look and move so similarly if they're all hand drawn?. I rarely feel impressed by animation in 2D shows.
I'm not trying to shit talk them, I'm genuinely curious here
>in Korea
wait what? Then what do the western 2D animation studios do.
>then how come the animation itself looks so basic and sort of stiff?
because it's cheap
>Then what do the western 2D animation studios do
commercials mainly if you're talking about studios that actually do the animation
>because it's cheap
Huh. So then is it sort of a given that all 2D animated shows are doomed to have shit animation?
If the shows are hand drawn, which as far as I'm aware takes a lot of time and effort as it is, then how come they don't "look" it? Compared to something like Tom & Jerry which I know is hand drawn and in my head, is how hand drawn animation looks, it's night and day, right?
>commercials mainly if you're talking about studios that actually do the animation
What do all the animation students do once they leave college? What does CN do? Surely they don't just outsource everything to cheap labour countries?
>Like you'll never see a show pan up over the head of a rigged character, as if you watched the camera move from eye level to, say, looking down on the character from overhead
Why don't we see this if the animation is hand drawn anyway? If you're using hand drawn animation, you're not using rigs, right? Something like Gravity Falls, it doesn't seem wildly different to shows I've seen animated on rigs.
Sorry if questions are dumb, I am just curious as I'd like to learn more about this stuff.
>What do all the animation students do once they leave college?
either storyboarding, work at a feature studio, or commercials
or not get a job in the animation industry at all
I'm pretty sure there are 2D animation studios in the west though right? Maybe not many but I feel like I have definitely seen them in the credits of some 2D shows.
I really didn't know this though. I thought the likes of CN and Disney had their animation sort of done in house. I had no idea they'd just do the storyboarding then ship that shit off elsewhere. I still don't know if you're exaggerating slightly or if this is simply an industry fact.
Mediocre, but how come I can't really point to even one that feels visually distinguished, when they're taking the time to be hand drawn anyway? If it's hand drawn why is it looking so similar to rigged and not taking liberties? I don't really see camera movements or use of the 2D space and even orbital movement as mentioned earlier seems limited.
This entire time I thought the reason shows look so similar is because they all just use rigs and it's easier to do it that way. Learning it's all hand drawn raises a lot of questions. What software is used? I know Flash and ToonBoom are often used for rigs, what about for hand drawn animation?
Thanks for the explanation. Family guy is a good example and one that again, I would have absolutely guessed as rigged. I would guess modern Simpsons as rigged too but not classic, dunno why but I don't really watch the former lel.
Just having a hard time wrapping my head round the fact that if the time is taken for this all to be hand drawn anyway, why don't we see a better animated style.
I don't watch it but I think Hazbin looks nicely animated, maybe because it's just rougher around the edges but it seems easier to tell that's hand drawn at times.
If I recall I think simpsons is a mix. Their new intro sequence is absolutely partly rigged. You can have a scene be all frame by frame and then a section be rigged. The babies shaking their fists is a dead giveaway. I haven't seen any newest family guy episodes but they're probably also mixed depending on the situation. It's subtle but there's these moments where a character or object or a part of a character moves without any change/morph whatsoever to its outline, those might be the trickiest to spot for the untrained eye.
Some rigged cartoons will be constantly changing or morphing the outlines, but in a way that's so fluid and consistent between frames that you can tell a computer generated those inbetween(tweened) frames.
The really really hard ones to tell are high level animations like Klaus. That movie looks like straight up cgi but the characters are all hand drawn. Don't know what to suggest in that case. They really went for that cgi perfect motion by hand kind of insane
>You can have a scene be all frame by frame and then a section be rigged
Is that common? To have rigs for your characters when you won't even use them often since most stuff is frame by frame?
How do rigged cartoons constantly change the outlines? I thought by their nature rigged meant staying on model and no change of outlines?
Unless those changes are when there's a shift to hand drawn
I have seen Klaus, it does look really good, although I remember some criticism in that it looks so much like CG, so what was the point in making it 2D at all. I get it I guess.
You can rig something up fairly easily. Lots of online artists will rig up their still illustration to "move" but it's just separating it into sections and moving or morphing each one individually. Way faster and easier than manually animating.
Outlines on rigs can be changed with a sort of liquify effect if you will. Pinching or transforming a shape via a grid or what have you. Some basic experience in an image editing software would help you understand how it works. It's the fluidity and accuracy with which those shapes change that give it away.
I dunno though I ask the same thing. Could have just been cg but I respect the proof that humans can be just as effective as computers with enough effort
Ah right, I see. Thank you, it makes sense then. I guess when they are warped then rigged would look very off in comparison to hand drawn and hand drawn is far more fluid.
>Why don't we see this if the animation is hand drawn anyway?
I imagine it's a cope. They soothe themselves with the thought of their work being drawn frame by frame (by Koreans) while using absolutely no creativity in their storyboarding to give the show cool camera work that frame by frame allows for. Maybe they're afraid of the Koreans screwing it up.
Shows like the simpsons or even family guy do look very stiff and on model, but you have to be on the look out for the tells like when their bodies tumble down some stairs and spin in the process. Or fall forward toward the camera onto their face. Those are also orbital situations you can't do well with rigs
>So if it's all hand drawn, does that mean there are no rigs whatsoever?
Yep, all frame-by-frame.
>Also I posted those shows but they were just an example, I'd guess the same about Amphibia, Owl house, Hilda etc. But again, I'm probably off.
Hilda's rigged, but Amphibia and OH are Fbf yeah.
>If these are all hand drawn, then how come the animation itself looks so basic and sort of stiff?
Aside from the cost it's often the studio's quality itself that's often a huge determining factor in the animation's quality. Most Korean studios are fairly mediocre in terms of output.
> As they take great pride in interesting and engaging shot composition and "camera" work. But that shit costs a frickton
Really? I thought camerawork stuff isn’t that expensive, you just need good directing
The point being good story boarders and directors are expensive, good keyframe artists who can draw proper perspective and characters at any angle are expensive, and hiring an offshore studio who does good inbetweens is more expensive because cheap ones are gonna frick up complex angles somewhere and you'll need to get more scenes reanimated
dp most animation studios offshore the keyframe artists too or is that one thing they actually do in house?
From what I've heard from network shows, keyframes are typically done in-house and the rest is filled in by koreans. Sometimes networks team writers up with English speaking studios like flying bark in Australia though, and flying bark does everything themselves from storyboarding to layouts to keyframes to inbetweens. But again, flying bark is more expensive. They only really work with franchises that have money like tmnt and lego.
I see, thank you. I know keyframes are vital of course, but how much of the overall production are they? Meaning, with all the keyframes, is there still a shit ton left to do for the tweeners?
Are keyframes basically putting the storyboard but into animation, or is it more involved than that?
Also why Korea specifically? There must be studios from other countries that are cheap, right?
I'm just a layman who dabbled in animation so take this with a grain of salt but storyboards exist just for the general flow of scenes across the episode. Timing, queues and direction mainly. If a camera pans, what direction it pans to. Zoom outs, zoom ins, how far to zoom. Which character enters from which side. If a character's head turns, where it should turn to. It's not exactly keyframes but more like "important to depict" frames and what exact time they're meant to occur on. Sometimes you'll see studio leaks of new episodes with a production timer/clock running in the corner. Everything has to occur and move on time. That's the guide for the animation later.
Keyframes are generally all the frames between motion. Inbetweens are where the motion occurs. There's a frickton more keyframes being drawn than story board frames in a cartoon. Ball sitting on the ground on the left is a keyframe. Rolling to the right are inbetweens, then the ball sitting on ground on the right is the next keyframe.
Thanks, I appreciate the explanation, it's helpful.
I kinda thought maybe the keyframes were just the storyboards put into practice, but it seems like while it is that, it's much more too. I just wondered because sometimes I see fairly detailed storyboards or animatics, to where you can pretty much get the general gist of everything. But I've also seen far less detailed ones.Not sure if there is a difference between a storyboard and animatic actually, but yeah.
As far as I know an animatic is just a storyboard made easier because it's already pre-timed properly into a video format with all the zooming and panning. I've heard it's considered overkill, but if you're doing really complex shots and action movements it can help a lot. There's some amazing animatics for Rise of the TMNT by an animator who I believe won some kind of award for his work. But I recall another animator commenting that what he did was not standard practice. Storyboards used to be way more detailed back in the day because cartoons used more complicated camerawork and angles back in the day. These days you can get away with scribbling everything because there's little need for nuance in the art. It doesn't help that story boarders in modern production also work in layouts and keyframing and whatever else at the same time. They're basically doing 5 different jobs at once that used to require 5 individual people. No time to agonize over detailed storyboards.
Cheers. I'm not familiar with the cg part of the industry myself. I've tried blender and SFM but don't know anyone working officially in 3D, unlike 2D where I had a few acquaintences. I'd bet there's more need for modeling and rigging in the west though than straight up animation gruntwork. Just an educated guess tho
Thanks for the explanation, the storyboards/animatic stuff makes sense.
One thing I would ask though, but I would guess it might be a long answer is why are cartoons less comlpex now than back in the day? What changed?
I know things were likely handled in house before but it's still hand drawn animation, right? So why was it better in the past?
>I've tried blender and SFM but don't know anyone working officially in 3D
Interesting. I've considered picking it up in the past, not just as a hobby but maybe as a path but if the gruntwork is just outsourced to India, maybe I'd struggle to find footing there.
Do videogames outsource their cut scenes and stuff too? They have a lot of animation going on
>Do videogames outsource their cut scenes and stuff too?
Sometimes, yeah.
https://nintendosoup.com/game-freak-outsources-creation-of-pokemon-models-and-animations-to-over-100-employees/
>what changed
The people working in animation and the amount of money networks are willing to spend. Companies with money and willing to spend money like netflix create shows like green eggs and ham. Lots of complex camerawork and fun directing. No clue what studios worked on it. TV networks are reluctant to spend money, so they're reluctant to hire more competent animators/artists, and reluctant to outsource to a more skilled foreign studio or ask more of the foreign studios. Money is the tldr.
Not sure about videogame cutscenes, just the programming part I could say with certainty. I just know a frick ton of kids cgi animation is being done in india
Thanks, interesting to learn.
Shitty at the same time because my goals of learning CG animation may not be for much if I can't take it into something else.
I know networks don't want to spend too much money on animation, but I'd have thought that with advanced tools at animators disposal and things like being able to outsource on the cheap, costs wouldn't be higher than they were before. Or if they are, then studios would get more done as opposed to less
Inflation, cost of living where animation studios are located going up, ceos and executives taking bigger and bigger slices of the pie. Cheaper more efficient tools don't mean better faster products, they tend to mean richer corporations and cheaper products. Sadly.
I see. Shame the thread is dying, thanks for the discussion
You too
Forgot to mention, we used to hire japan, we switched to Korea because it's cheaper. still largely use korea right now but I heard it's catching on to use SEA countries lately. 2D animation is a special industry with a specific skill set. You want a place that has lots of people formally trained in it which japan and korea have. Lots of Indians are trained in cgi animation nowadays so cg animation gets outsourced there iirc along with programming jobs for video games
Thanks.
Would you say it's not really worth learning CG then if it gets outsourced to India? That's the cheapest of the cheap, right?
As per SEA countries, I've noticed too that the likes of Singapore and Indonesia seem to have quite a rise in animation. I'm not exactly sure why or how it's come about but there are some popular universities for animation over there
Maybe I'm dumb, but if you asked me, I would guess most animated shows these days have rigs and don't hand draw all their animation. A lot of shows look sort of basic to be hand drawn, and I don't mean the art style, but the movement itself.
Am I way off here? How do I learn more to distinguish differences?
steven universe is all hand-drawn
i think gumball is tweened
iirc gravity falls and star vs are hand-drawn
Star Vs was ToonBoom animated at first, then it became hand-drawn later on iir.
The main thing is the tweening, that fluid motion between pose 1 and pose 2. Rigs don't warp or morph, none of their body segments change size (unless the size changing is the point.) Its super consistent that way to a point of flaw. The other thing is when characters don't move orbitally. Modern rigs have gotten fancier these days where they can "turn" a little bit (it's an illusion of turning) but it's still not fully orbital. Like you'll never see a show pan up over the head of a rigged character, as if you watched the camera move from eye level to, say, looking down on the character from overhead. There's no "3D" feeling at any point. Modern shows fill this in with some frame by frame animation nowadays if they need it. But most shows won't bother, they'll just stick to eye level. You can get different rigs of the same character at different angles, like one from above, one from below, profile, front view, but you won't really see them transition from one to the other. Usually cuts between the shots.
>still using this dumbass bad-faith meme in 2023
It's not exactly in model but it's not that dar either. No one is willing to have a level headed discussion about the "calarts"/beanmouth style trend.
it's so funny because the "calarts" style has been out of fasion for a while now
Not true, Big City Greens, Kiff and Craig of the Creek are still there, Gravity Falls is getting some new content soon as well. It's far from out of fashion, it's simply not as intense as mid 2010s
Kiff doesn't even look like the meme.
calarts wasn't the point of the post, it's just an image I attached which had a few recent animated shows in it
Rigging class consists of about 20 people majority of the time.
3 will love it and want to do that since they like mechanical type jobs and puzzle solving.
The other 17 students will hope no one ever asks them to rig a damn thing ever again
Because unlike indie gaming fans, animations fans can't accept simpler animation.
>simpler animation.
Depends on what you mean by that. I mean, I don't blame animation fans for not wanting something about the quality of say, Dingo Pictures or Paddy the Pelican.
>games make profit
If they're notable enough to, and that's a big "IF"
It's amazing there are a thousand of good indie games, but are zero (0) good indie animation series
>It's amazing there are a thousand of good indie games
>good
Wouldn't go that far.
I mean a person could make a good game on their own, but you really need more than one person to produce an indie animation. You also need to market the shit out of it to garner up a big enough fanbase to buy merch so you can continue to produce episode of said animation.
cause video games are more effort efficient. with a few seconds of animation you can squeeze out several minutes if not hours of gameplay . you can reuse a lot of animation frames,
cause it's easier to make and distribute, and support indie games. This is also why there are zero good indie live action movies or series that are strictly on the internet.
This
I'm replaying a mid/low budget JRPG from 2009 and you can just FEEL the budget draining away during the very brief very rare anime cutscenes. They just couldn't afford any more than that
Is Monkey Wrench any good? It looks pretty gay honestly.
people are willing to purchase a game, but not a video
Depends.
Exposure and means of income
Games sell copies
A series can only get money from ads, merchandise or putting the series up for streaming if they are lucky. Nobody will purchase the right to watch one series.
>Games sell copies
Sure, if they have good enough exposure, and even then a lot of them don't have that luxury.
This actually seems fairly inexpensive for an animated show too.
Zeurel can handle so much of the work himself, guess it drives down the cost of labour by a lot.
ngl Im happy i became a programmer first and artist second
if i can figure out a good enough gameplay loop, I can shit out a few artistic games for ze $$$
think naissance or lethal company (not that they are my metric for success here, i'm not a moron)
Most indie games make no money
I'd never pay for "Monkey Wrench" even if it's an indie game instead of animation simply because that project have zero appeal to me.
I'd donate money to other indie animation turned indie games tho.
>I'd donate money to other indie animation turned indie games tho.
Depends on how well their premises translate to game format.
I hate Monkey Wrench, the main characters are too ugly to look at for a full episode. The guy is a good animator but he is a shit designer. I hope he cancels this and starts a new project, possibly one where someone else designs the characters for him.
Too desperate for the youtube clout.
They need to start DMCAing videos after they blow up and using Newgrounds as permanent repository, and allowing a few to slip through the algos from time to time
Animators have skin in the game when it comes to algorithms, can produce niche content youtube couldn't, and they have the collective audience to do something about it
They unironically need Nebula for animators and comic makers. Could even be doubly profitable if they allow tips on top of the normal subscription (resulting in a nicer cut of donos that cycle back to their own projects)
Youtube is bleeding, and most of its content is algo chasing slop, a youtube competitor doesnt have to let every loser with a webcam and OBS flood their databanks with amnesia playthroughs.
How would you make money from these animations? Especially since they use copyrighted characters.
Pretty much this.
Also you can make asset-flipped games but there's nothing comparable for animation.
>How would you make money from these animations?
Patreon and/or merch.
starting a game is hard work but once you get over the hump of programming mechanics and making assets you can coast for a long time with a significantly faster workflow. it's like climbing up a mountain and skiing down the other side vs walking 50 miles in a straight line on flat land
This. Programming is hard, but once you get into the flow it's easy.
Animating is also hard, but once you get into the flow... it's still hard, and it still takes an eternity.
That really, REALLY depends on the language you're learning, especially if you're using a scripting language on a premade engine like Unity or Game Maker rather than making your own from scratch using C++/C# or some shit.
>most indie productions are mid as hell and made by mid artists who can't even draw.
>The ones that can draw have godawful writing.
It hurts but it's better than nothing I guess
>ITT morons say it's expensive
OP didn't ask how much it costs, but why it's hard to make money. Cost plays a role but is not the full picture.
Here's an answer: nobody buys 1 episode to watch. People buy a whole season. Also Black person.
>Also Black person.
How so exacly
Almost every answer here is wrong. The real reason is twofold:
First, you can create and tell a complete experience in a game with zero animation or programming experience needed. Toby Fox created Undertale with some of the worst programming ever seen. Fear and Hunger or Omori are made in RPGMaker. If you want to do something larger with gameplay you need programming chops (or a hired programming) but that's not even necessary.
Second, it's hard to sell a series. You can't go on Steam and buy an early access copy of a new animation series. The only subgenre that gets away with that is porn, since as it turns out people are willing to use patreon and so forth to pay animators doing porn. Should be zero surprise that most animators start with porn to build up capital.
>Toby Fox created Undertale with some of the worst programming ever seen.
FWIR he mostly used Drag & Drop with some fairly moderate GML implementation in some parts. That said GML in itself's simple to learn compared to most languages, with even some helpful documentation to boot.
Difficult to do if you're not very well-versed in any of the mainstream programming languages, hence why most premade game engines provide a decent middle ground to those who want to make games w/o having to get into the technical nitty-gritty.
Cinemaphile simultaneously thinks animation is dying and should be saved yet will not support anyone or anything independent or otherwise unless its corporate slop or porn
Anyone afraid of eros shouldn't be seeking art as a hobby.
A high quality cartoon like what you would see in a studio production would require a whole team to consistently put out new material and people don't just work for free.
Trying to aim for studio quality when you're starting out is a bit misguided tho, imo.
Helluva Boss at least had the benefit of already having a dedicated fanbase, but I heard they pay pennies over there. Makes me wonder how they can even keep going honestly.
Jobs are hard to come by for animators and pennies are better than nothing. Some animators I know would cut their tongues out to get on HB
Why not their penises?
A HB 7 minute short in the 60s to be produced was $3000 for the whole thing. With inflation that's now around $29,700 today. There was only 2 or 3 animators on those and they churned them like there was no tomorrow meaning stable work.
I don't have exact estimates, but that sounds like it was a much better gig that now.
Just make what you want but study the animation process and find creative workarounds to save money and time.
I wish more of these ambitious projects did this.
We'd get more episode and if it's popular then you can start asking for money from people for a quality boost in later episodes.
It does not need to match TV quality right off the bat. Most people will understand its a much smaller team putting this together and it's not cheap to try and match it right away.
>study the animation process and find creative workarounds to save money and time.
But then people would b***h that the animators cheaped out and they'll still demand better
Bitching about the animation quality of a free show from a small indie team is pretty fricking petty.
Where do you think we are?
Cinemaphile, where even if the animation is fantastic they'll still find something to b***h about. So no reason to care if they're petty about your budget constraints.
shut up , mr”idea guy”
I don't get it.
games make profit from the point of sale in a way that animation can't
So what I can't help but wonder is why do so many games, especially indie games that don't even have a huge budget, have these gorgeous 2D animated trailers?
I've lost count of the number of games I've thought looked interesting because they had a kickass animated trailer, only to look at the gameplay and it's just generic shit with none of the art style matching what was shown.
Isn't it expensive to have a 2D animated short made?
I get you on that. It has shades of that whole "bullshot" phenomenon dev studios partake in.
Because trailers are usually a minute long and shows are several minutes long. If they had to stretch out the trailer to 22 minutes with the same budget the animation quality would greatly suffer.
Right of course, I'm not saying why isn't this quality matched elsewhere, I'm more saying how are these small indie studios affording these trailers consistently?
I've seen them for games so low profile I don't even remember their names, I just wonder how they're affording it as I'd guess it was much more expensive.
it's just odd to me how often I come across stellar 2D animated trailers, that actually seems fully hand drawn in the video game space, yet in the professional animation space, I don't really see much of that or the same style.
I know it's apples and oranges but still
I've seen a lot of the twitter animators, no doubt very impressive. Some make shorts all by themselves that seem to have all the aspects of a high quality studio production. But in most cases it seems like these trailers are commissioned. Especially when the games themselves have no animation even remotely close to what's displayed in the trailer. I think the Shantae games have good animation even in game, right? The animated trailers at least give you a somewhat decent representation of the game itself.
Drives me nuts because I basically like/love any game that leans into the Cinemaphile side of things, so I'm often deceived.
Shantae started out as a pixel sprite style game, and it's art and quality improved massively since it started because the studio took what it earned and invested it into improving the product. I'm sure they'll keep this trend if they're still making more. Ideally this is how it should be right? Start within your means and focus on gameplay people want, if you have a good product and you treat it right it will gradually improve into whatever your dream vision of it was. I'm not sure why we don't see this in animation as a medium. A cartoon that starts out visually simpler but offering a great show. Then with popularity improves itself until it's what you envisioned all along
>I'm not sure why we don't see this in animation as a medium.
I think it's a lot more rarer in most 2D games than in animation.
I can't think of any examples besides that guy who makes spongebob anime intros.
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But that's not really a project so much as a series of memes.
>it's art and quality improved massively
Hell no. Risky's Revenge was peak, the shitty flash animations in the newer games suck.
>Right of course, I'm not saying why isn't this quality matched elsewhere, I'm more saying how are these small indie studios affording these trailers consistently?
I'm a indie dev and 3D animator, I know of another indie dev that got a deal from their publisher of a $150K advance in exchange for a 100% of sales until they pay off the $150K, then 30% of sales after that. I'd assume these other indie games that have high quality 2D animated trailer get a similar deal and spend $6K or so from the advance to commission a trailer. Otherwise if the don't have a publisher, they were probably rich already and invested $6k or so themselves.
There is higher costs involved with game dev than animation when it comes to 3D at least, 2D would about the same but animators can get away with pirating the tools more than game devs who have a slightly greater chance of getting caught. Cost isn't a issue, it's that no one pays for non-porn animation.
>$6K or so from the advance to commission a trailer
Is that the cost of a trailer, 6k? I guess that would make sense, I thought it would be more.
Thanks for sharing this information, it would make sense then if they are striking deals like that. What kind of games you make? Did you get into dev-ing or animating first? I'm thinking of picking one of them up
>Is that the cost of a trailer, 6k? I guess that would make sense, I thought it would be more.
It could more, $6K-$12K for a minute or so trailer.
>Thanks for sharing this information, it would make sense then if they are striking deals like that. What kind of games you make? Did you get into dev-ing or animating first? I'm thinking of picking one of them up
Right now I'm making a porn game to help finance my dream game, I got into animation first. I'd recommend learning both, especially if you don't plan to work with anyone else, as you will need both if go with game dev. Animation was easier for me learn than programming.
>It could more, $6K-$12K for a minute or so trailer.
That's kinda cheaper than I thought in fairness.
It then made me wonder why we don't see more animated trailers elsewhere then, but then it dawned on me other media doesn't really need them like videogames do.
I guess I can see where indie games can get that kind of budget
Thanks for the tip. To be honest I'm not really sure I want to game dev, I kind of think it'd be nice to work in vidya but I don't see myself programming, y'know? There are other roles though, I just don't know if I'd have many ideas for a game.
>animation first
Did you use Blender to learn? If you're self taught, roughly how long did it take ya?
>dream game
Any details you care to share? Don't have to, just curious. Good luck either way anon
first
>Did you use Blender to learn? If you're self taught, roughly how long did it take ya?
Yeah I use blender, it took around 2 years to learn it. I use Zbrush for sculpting as when I started blender was shit at sculpting performance, it's much better now and Zbrush isn't necessary. I also use Substance Painter for texturing which Blender is still lacking in, so it might be worth it still. SP is pretty intuitive, Zbrush isn't though. I'd share tutorials but the ones I used to learn are outdated for 2.79.
game
>Any details you care to share? Don't have to, just curious. Good luck either way anon
Thanks you. I don't want to share about my dream game since I mentioned making a porn game. Good luck to you as well.
I worry a little but as long as I keep my accounts separate I shouldn't have any issues and the porn isn't anything taboo.
Thanks for the tips and stuff. 2 years doesn't sound too bad.
>used to learn are outdated
Yeah I encounter this a lot, which kind of makes it annoying to find good tutorials since so many you find are indeed outdated.
I know it wouldn't be the worst to use older tutorials but man if there are newer tools it'd be best to learn to use them.
Makes sense on not sharing the game, I get that
Are you worried that being associated to porn games could tarnish your image? I guess it shouldn't be much of a issue if it doesn't contain anything too taboo but still.
Passion projects? There's a ton of small animators on twitter who are incredible when they're given the freedom to go all out.
Shantae isn't a particularly major game series but it got an opening animation sequence made by Studio Trigger. I tried quick searching how much it cost them but I haven't found any info yet.
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I imagine it costs a pretty penny for even 30 seconds of this animation, but WayForward makes enough with mild success to afford it
Dude that's barely animated at all. It was almost all blurs and still images sliding across the screen. It seems like it was made by an intern.
Those trailers are just a kind of comercial. It's not uncommon for animation in ads to be better than TV shows.
How much do you think an animated short like that costs? I just wonder why it's so commonplace in vidya, but rarely anywhere else.
I'd say at least $100k
That's crazy. Where do these indie devs get the budget for that?
>Where do these indie devs get the budget for that?
from their games being mega successful.
Dead Cells sold 850k before leaving early access and 10 months later reached 2 million while Vampire Survivors sold over 5 million.
That's Dead Cells and VS, but I see games which don't have anywhere close to that success putting out 2D trailers
such as?
The thing is, I can't remember the name of any of them
I tried to search and couldn't find them either
So now it's just going to sound like I pulled it out of my ass and I'm bullshitting you. But you have to believe me anon. I've seen animated trailers for games that simply don't have that kind of financial success. You have to believe.
On another note, are 3D animated trailers cheaper than 2D animated ones, by some margin? Not ones made in the game engine, but just separately produced 3D trailers. Because I see a fair few of them
Not very expensive, also it goes into a different column, so to speak, it's a marketing cost and not a dev cost. Also a super important thing is it's a very predictable cost, you go to bobbypills or whatever and ask for 30 seconds of animation, the estimate isn't gonna change after that and if it should then they're just gonna cut frames, while for dev if a programmer gives you an estimate they guarantee to be exact they're lying through their teeth to get you to sign, and the actual cost is much more variable.
Because it's meant to grab your attention.
It's the main reason why (even to this day) many animated opens are much better animated than the actual show, if they have an animated opening that is.
>why indie games have 2D animated trailers
if they showed gameplay footage it would leak the whole game.
Because it's like a minute long at most and there's little/no voice acting, no lip syncing, no plot, and often uses lots of little cheats (like your image not having a background or complex shading/lighting.)
It's not hard to drop some money on some animator on Fiverr or something and give them some basic outline and some concept art.
I see, that makes a lot of sense thanks
I feel like I really don't understand the process these fricks go into where they do this and somehow don't think they come off as scam pushing shitbags.
Animation from a studio will have a big-ol dollar sign attached to each episode.
Lots and lots of hands in the pie.
Then you get these things where some pencil monkey wants to just flex his art chops instead of telling a story.
A sickening amount of indie comics including webcomics are guilty of the same focus on visuals and it all just echos the same shit in movies and videogame development.
Remember that Zeurel is not a neutral observer. He wants people to buy his merch.
I don't see the problem if the merch helps fund new episodes.
I'm not saying he's wrong for wanting people to buy his merch. The point is that he has an incentive to spin things.
Wow, you know people used to think peddling was malevolent behaviour worthy of scrutiny, but the moral compass just keeps on dropping, man.
I have no idea what you're talking about.
Indie games have a massive infrastructure that allows them to be sold, publicized and even get investment from publishers. There's also a huge number of people who have the basic skills required for game dev (especially people who used to work for bigger studios and then went their own way), while there's not much equivalent for animation. Indie games also benefit from a massive growth of things like pre-made assets which animation doesn't benefit from in the same way.
How come many indie animations nowadays are opting for shows, instead of feature length movies? i don't know much about movie distribution so maybe what I'm saying isn't at all useful or just eats at the money, but at least with movies, you can put them in theatres, or on DVDs, or put out a trailer and have people buy the movie digitally. is there just too much upfront cost to make movies?
It allows the teams to build up immense hype and profit over time (Glitch) or cancel a series before too much investment is made (most).
To give more measured answer about why indie animation is harder to cash in than indie games, it comes down to three things:
>Animation is the most expensive part of game design, and even then games do everything they can to automate parts of it and reuse frames and animation cycles. Indie animation is basically taking the most expensive part of the project and making it the whole project itself.
>If you have to rely purely on your animation, without using the cost saving measures game use, you end up with an utterly massive workload. You can make a game in time it takes one person to make one minute of animated action.
>Distribution of indie animation sucks compared to the distribution of the games. With games, you can sell them directly to people. With animation, you are usually on mercy of either crowd funding or advert revenue.
>Indie Game: Direct payment for product
>Indie Animation: indirect payment for product
not really that hard to understand
It's not about the cost, it's about how much easier games are to monetize.
If you make an indie game you can sell it on steam, gog, itch, etc...
If you make an indie animation, well nobody is going to buy a single episodes or even a few episodes, so you'll publish your animation for free and HOPE to monetize it some other way. Ads probably don't pay near enough. Merchandise is probably your best bet. All in all it's much messier.
>"hey, enjoyed the pilot? wanna watch the other episodes? go to our website and pay $5 so you can have full access to the season and if you want more, subscribe to our patreon to get more BTS stuff!
why don't they simply do this?
or better yet, why not make an animation version of nebula for animation creators?
If you're online enough to be paying patreons for content, you're online enough to know how to stream and pirate.
Plus, with the likes of Netflix, there is so much content to stream and watch for that $5 instead, that they can just go elsewhere. Yeah it's not the same and the quality might not be as good, but honestly a lot of people watch content for the sake of watching content rather than looking for something specific. It's why the Netflix model works.
Most people are too comfortable or spoiled with shit like Netflix or crunchyroll and probably think paying $5 for just one episode or series is just too much.
But it could be done, but you need a very hardcore audience that will support you no matter what. People like Sam Hyde that have a very die hard fanbase that hang on his every word will gladly pay for content. Animation wise Vivziepop is big enough that maybe she could do it. But if we are being honest I don't see many people here paying $4.99 for the next Monkey Wrench episode. I would gladly pay for a show that I actually like if I didn't live in a third world hell hole
Real reason is that animators can't play nice with eachother and would allow the far left to overtake a platform like it immeadiately
>so what chud
Its not *always* the ideas I take issue with, the LGBT+ and ally community is extremely toxic and mentally ill, countless times one spill their spaghetti and torches groups like SleepyCabin
Putting em in control of communities results in boring hugboxes like reddit or tumblr
These issues fall to the way side further when you consider many animators refuse to humble themselves or learn the business of animation
Over exert, over extend, and over pay is the motto of most indie animation I see
But I guess thats a consequence of every animation being make or break, and the possibility of it being their only chance to get the series made
A little humility and a willingness to work in a team would go a long way for these guys, hell a SleepyCabin 2 with Vizie/TADC/the Ghost of SC1 could probably pull it off
It doesn't have to be for political reasons, artists are just fickle in general and get uppity if they have to share or get along with artists not in their immediate circle
And even then they're very two-faced with the other artists they associate with, the minute one of them starts doing better than the rest they'll throw that artist under the bus until they get something out of it
They treat life like it's still high school and they desperately want to sit at the cool kids table except that table is twitter and the other cool kids are just other losers
What the frick artists do you follow? If it’s literally who’s on Twitter, I get how you can see em like that, but I stick to mainly chill industry types/devoted hobbyists and none of them act this way.
If it’s NSFW artists, I get it though. A lot are chill, but a good chunk get weirdly insecure about everything
>Please support-
No.
Die.
Starve.
Merry Christmas homosexual.
Paying for a game just feels more worth your money. We are used to cartoons being "free", paid off by ad sponsorship on tv.
It doesn't help that Monkey Wrench is just not that interesting. It doesn't even have a dedicated writing spot, and it shows.
>your parents paying for cable and sitting through hours of shitty commercials between shows that waste time you could be doing something else
>"""free"""
lol, lmao
I think anon's point is that the time being used to sit through TV advertisements is taken advantage of because you could be watching another channel or having sex or touching grass. Time is money. It's the same principle behind choosing what roller coaster to go on in a theme park based on how long the lines are.
It's not like the ads on youtube where you can skip them or install an adblocker.
Was buying home media for cartoon shows (not movies) ever common?
Free-to-air television exists anon.
Classic cartoons also did not have "a dedicated writing spot." You're just demanding to be the one to tell artists what to do, or someone just like you. It's the style of cartoon monkey wrench is that motivates the hate.
pedo
And you're opening your mouth because I'm attacking Homestuck and the trannies it produced elsewhere. Shut up, try to derail an animation discussion again and Industry animators will be whining
If you hate Homestuck then why were you trying to copy MSPaint Adventures using AIslop?
>guy arrived.
Thread's dead. And it was such a good thread too.
What you're communicating is that I'm spoiling the "thread" of your narrative. And no abusing the creator of Monkey Wrench to serve the industry isn't a good "thread." You're trying to violate my mind with "guilt" about potentially spoiling industry projects with my criticism, even though they have built thousands of careers on things like Steven Universe made with my artistic inspiration, Steven Universe being created by a fellow John K student and Cinemaphileanon.
Screenshotted for sending to Industry people
My best friend worked on Homestuck and I am passionate about AI as my big video game project from 2012 I was developing with my best friend is about AI development.
>"Abusing the creator"
What the frick are you even talking about? We are discussing the production process behind animation and the different ways to develop something.
It's called a normal conversation. Nobody here wants him to fail, quite the opposite actually.
Not like you'll ever have something like that.
Lmao your effort to violate my mind after getting called out for it is just embarrassing dude, tell the women who tell you what to do that it's time to move on from this, emasculated individual
>It's called a normal conversation.
No you're trying to manufacture a narrative about the creator of monkey wrench, I can see straight through it but I'm usually polite enough not to mention it. Just like Superman doesn't go around using his x-ray vision for no reason.
What narrative?
>I'm usually polite
You have zero self awareness.
Yeah buddy I'm not going to let my self-comprehension be defined by the industry culture like yourself, mentally dominated by people like troony storyboard artists. That's an intentional decision, not an accident, I'm 33 years old.
Just give up. People can read my stories if they want to see how I express my unique identity, but I know you don't because you're not unique
You're not answering the question. What narrative am I and others trying to push on Zeurel?
I'm also not industry and never plan to be a part of it. I'm just an animation fanatic interested in discussing how to make stuff.
>Interrogation
All right bud I'm going to message some of those industry artists with a screenshot and tell them to stop your harassment since you can't listen to yourself.
I am a PARANORMAL artist, demanding me to explain everything is a psychological violation and an attack on my creativity. I'm going to message industry artists until you STOP, not act disingenuous.
Message all the industry artists you want, I have nothing to lose because I don't want to be part of the industry. Not that they'd even know who I am anyway.
Not everyone thinks like you so if you're going to be fricking vague then people are going to ask you questions.
That's what industry trolls always say to try to dampen my conviction. Then later they give up. I'm going to wait on the people I messaged a little bit then I'll barrage again if you're still talking
>going to be fricking vague
I am a paranormal artist. I like mystery. There's no reason for interrogation besides to extract information from me because unlike a lot of people who work in the industry I am a creative person and yet they will not allow me any income or credit in return.
Every time I show up in a thread like this someone like you turns psychotic to represent the industry. Stop this programming.
>this schizo somehow still hasn't been banned
This is a metaphor for me being able to participate in the animation community. You can't change that because people are making projects using my artistic inspiration. Like Helluva Boss.
This is queering my content because I use AI as my collaborator. It's doubly pathetic because humans refuse to be collaborators with me.
This is psychological abuse because my notions of mystery have not spread around society yet. (Understandable considering that mystery is mystery) messaged another group of Industry people, so stop next time instead of searching for a way to violate my brain.
>Asking a question is "violating my brain"
You are mentally ill.
I see you've fully crumpled it down.
And now here's the part where I say that you can learn a lot about my artistic perspective by actually reading and looking at my work, I just expect you're afraid of that because I'm a Catholic, and so you want to mine ideas from me from comments.
In fact that's what you just said by translating being religious as being mentally ill.
I'm Catholic too and my family raised me to be that.
You're mentally ill.
You're whatever benefits you in the discussion and whatever you think will get you artistic inspiration for free. I'm calling every single tactic you're using and you're showing the pathetic nature of Industry people who abuse people like the creator of monkey wrench like they are slaves of Hollywood.
You're strengthening my resolve for ruining Christmas for industry people. There's no limit to how much of my life you'll waste without that.
Ok you do that. Tell them my last name is Perez as well so they know who to look out for.
You're not an artist. Show us something you drew with your own two hands.
Instead of responding to you I will respond to people in the industry since after all you are just their mouthpiece, looking to cause emotional damage.
You're doing what I just told you not to do. I know you're used to not listening to people on the internet but I can easily rack up therapy bills of people in the industry so shut up.
>schizo refuses to answer questions then gets mad at the person asking the question for being smarter than him
"Smart" means connected to the industry here. "Intelligence" coming from knowing them, their culture, and being aware of what they're working on behind the scenes. Unfortunate for you that they all have tons of connections to me and so I can reshape your "intelligence" at any time.
If you want me to expose your psychology that's a nice gift to people like the creator of monkey wrench
Hi budget projects are completely dishonest slop in animation.
>being this delulu
1. You're barely capable of communicating anything. You don't read, you don't respond, you just meme on cue. 2. The act of pretending like industry people don't go on the internet needs to die fully. While they were chasing that Willy Wonka fantasy they alienated kids from animation, they destroyed the potential of promising series like Steven Universe, their industry fell apart and lost creator-driven initiatives, and many other things happened because they were lost in their own heads.
You people feel the need to grasp for control of monkey wrench out of jealousy that he is still capable of making something original and cool, even if it isn't perfect.
>Someone like Zuerel should really reel it back though, he's already proven himself capable of working for a studio.
This is just nakedly condemning him for animating as an animator out of the marxist impulse that he's making people who can't animate like him look bad.
>promising series like Steven Universe
lel, only 30 something lgbtq morons watched this, which is why the massive push with merch and even videogames was a fiasco, and thus ended the attempt at establishing a franchise.
they need to make shows that hook kids and early teens, but they can't because shows are made by ~30 year old SJW's for ~30 year old SJW's, and that's why western animation is dead.
meanwhile anime is thriving, and it's generally not even particularly good, it's just that compared to the shit that is current day western animation, it seems amazing.
The first season was a decent kids show with adventuring magical people that fought monsters and nabbed magical artifacts from ancient temples. It worked.
Somehow that turned into wacky gay people hanging out in a beach town doing wacky gay mundane shit in all the later seasons though.
Sort of like how Adventure Time was about a kid adventurer who fought monsters in the first season, and then was existential cerebral crap in all the other seasons.
Zeurel is upset with how much its costing and people are giving suggestions on how he could take creative steps to save money.
Spamming industry workers' Twitter DMs with your schizo shit doesn't mean you have connections. You just bothered people
Steven Universe was inspired by me, the owl house was inspired by me, we came from the same communities, they fell apart without me. My best friend worked on both Homestuck and undertale which is common fandom history to today's animation people. And you trolls can say NOTHING real to these facts.
There are many other projects like every project attached to those projects.
Yeah I'm destroying your industry instead since you thought that was a great response to make thousands of times.
What's your real name, where are your credits on the shows
Genuinely have a nice day.
>my content
Where?
All I've seen is pathetic robotic mistakes that you told some electric moron to make
You're getting more childish because behind the industry person act you're just a stupid kid in an adult body who belongs nowhere near a serious discussion, trying to control the narrative about monkey wrench. Are you fricking done yet?
Even if I was, I'd never want to work with you or your friends anyway so you'd be doing me a big favor.
I'm just asking to elaborate your claim which 99.99999% of the population of Earth would say is a reasonable request.
Using AI is not making art
Can you explain how a paranormal artist differs from other artists, please?
Because game creation is easier than animation. At least animation worth a damn.
Tamers12345 manages just fine. He pumps out animation like nothing. And don't tell me it's not "worth a damn."
His stuff is carried by good writing, which not only is another topic in itself, but good writing can easily carry "ugly" shows.
Just look at South Park for a huge example maybe not a recent example, but that's another discussion entirely. Not everyone has writing chops, especially ones that can carry an art style.
>Tamers12345
Not only is it not worth a damn, it’s not talked about anywhere outside of Cinemaphile and is entirely dependent on moronic jokes about Sonic Underground. Not exactly what people imagine when you pitch indie animation to them, and Tamers would get rightfully chewed if he suddenly started price gating his work which would be the only way to get money out of it without any form of initial investment.
ChatGPT told me I made a really good script for an animated 1 hour movie that has the possibility of being loved by a large audience and getting funded.
I know it's not 100% reliable but it was trained on a bunch of data and I felt I should tell you all.
I bet ChatGPT also said you were a real woman.
Jealous that my script got such a good review from ChatGPT? I bet you are.
I use ad blockers
Why does this entire thread even exist? The reasons why animation is expensive and time-consuming should be apparent from the moment you start trying to animate something. And once you think about the type of person who's willing to dedicate themselves to doing that until completion you start to realize why the writing quality suffers
It was a thinly veiled thread to make fun of Zeurel/Monkey Wrench, but I like that it kind of became an actual discussion in the differences in both indie industries and mediums. It’s nice actually talking shop while on topic and not just gossiping about e-celebs or dealing with ragebait.
are u op or nah?
Nobody is making "fun" of it, people are discussing that the way its being produced isn't the most practical way to do it.
There is just as much Animation, modeling, rendering, etc in a game than a show. This makes no sense to me.
Depends on the game, but for the most part, that's not true at all
nta but is it not? Games these days have cut scenes that in total stretch over 3 or 4 hours. Of course, they aren't the same quality as you'd find in an animated film or even show, but the sheer volume they have, especially if you consider non cutscene animations, isn't it rather substantial?
>look for animation indie projects
>it's all furries
either way you need to hype up a game and then make them download something for money, indie creators can only upload them to youtube, and it's not like they can reach more than a few k of supporters on patreon, so is a different business model, and if you want to produce a full show it's gonna cost you 1m+ even if you use the cheapest twitter animators that you can find, you can make a shitty indie game for much much less
Any scalie indie projects?
Does that one series about dinosaurs that's animated in paint count?
I don't know what you're talking about but if they're bipedal, yes.
There it is.
But yeah, (most of?) the characters seem to be semi-anthro at least.
No idea what they're saying or the plot/context but I find it charming in an unusual way. Count me as a fan.
I meant anthro
Its because modern animators are fricking hacks and dont know how to write a good story that grips its viewers. Tell me, what would a young man rather consume:
>a show about a fat queer boy who fights evil with the power of gay
or
>a video game about slaying evil spirits, killing monsters, and doing badass shit
>young man
the world doesnt solely revolve around this market , frick off
Is one of the biggest ones though
>the world doesnt solely revolve around this market ,
anon, it kind of almost literally does
>Music: $8000
...How? Assuming this is an episodic 20-minute-long cartoon, how the frick did they manage to spend 8 grand on music?
It's also including sound design.
rights, studio time, engineering , mixing, mastering etc etc
Zeurel kind of brings it upon himself. He could simplify his character designs, he could utilize a few more held poses here and there, he doesn't need a keyframe EVERY syllable, and the visuals would still be great. With an experienced animation/art director that he could collaborate with, he could EASILY knock out $15k from the needed budget and probably get an episode out a couple of months earlier as a result.
All of this is a moot point because the writing is still lame and doesn't hook in viewers at all. The show should be balls-to-the-wall wordplays and nonsense like Earthworm Jim and instead it's just... A lot of bad one-liners and bad attempts at writing charismatic characters.
Most modern anime would really benefit from your suggestions as well, it seems.
this lmao
but they can't since it's a part of the brand
Except the changes make her look even worse
And this kind of bullshit is why indie animation can't take off
You have to learn to accept that it can't look as good as big studio animation
Its bullshieet man
He's leaning on the animation more than the writing. The pacing, jokes, and dialogue seems all a little off. Not enough to say it's bad, but it's not great. So we get an average show with higher quality in animation that only enthusiasts and animators would appreciate. Digital circus grew huge buzz on the designs and premise of being stuck in a digital world with an ending that hammers it home. Not that original to Tron or anime with the same plot but it had things that worked. When animation is at the top of positives, you're having issues you don't want to address with characters and story. He needs to pivot in the writing and designs. because he can't keep going on. I don't think he is close to breaking even. He's getting help with Patreon but ad revenue is way too low to keep him ahead in getting more episodes out in a timely way. He needs higher views and merch and he reupload his episodes on a new channel and the algorithm can easily remove you from recommended so he is only hurting himself because you can rebrand your account than risking a new channel.
He needs to bite the bullet and reboot this property as a webcomic.
If someday I get to be the boss of my OWN Indie Animation Company, would bully & make artists do my shit for cheap, and make them feel bad to the point they slave themselves to do my bidding.
After all, a suffering artist is a productive artist.
Of course I don't live in a "First world" shithole, how could you tell?
>$4,000 to voice actors
God damn maybe he had a point.
What was his point? I thought he just talked about voicing non-Asian characters. Did he talk about VA pay at some point?
I don't know, some dipshit was spamming something about VA pay with his picture for a couple weeks on Cinemaphile. I just watch his funny skits.
Are they counting mobile games? If they're counting mobile games, there's your answer... but even if they aren't the answer is the same: Microtransactions.
You basically have to pay to unlock anything these days.
Why not make both a pilot with a game tie in? Money towards the game could go towards the pilot. Make it a franchise.
Trips of truth I've been suggesting this for animation for a while. It could be a really simple game too, so long as it's fun and captures what the shows about
I'm going to guess that a cartoonist being forced to leap into the world of game dev is a very daunting one. Maybe an indie creator has a good idea on how to budget a YouTube series, who to hire, what qualities to look for in their crew, roughly how much time and money something should cost. But game dev? That's a whole different spreadsheet, and one can easily be scammed by an unreliable studio or an overpriced studio because they're simply not familiar enough with the industry to know better.
Andrew Hussie is a famous example of this.
Would play a HH point and click tbh.
>$2,500 per minute of animation
This makes the reveal that RWBY costs between $25,000 to $35,000 for every minute of animation even more hilarious. I almost feel bad for RWBYgays, having their entire show dissolve because the people in charge got scammed into using the world's most expensive blender ripoff.
The expensive blender ripoff is still tons more popular than Monkey Wrench.
It was far more popular when it was animated with actual shovelware by a few guys that were flying by the seam of their pants. The animation quality has frickall to do with it's success, and if anything is directly tied to it's death since the show is apparently so expensive they have to cancel it and beg for donations online now. But hey, at least it looks nice. Totally worth running the entire show into the ground over.
A videogame usually goes for 5 or 10 dollars. Say you get 1,000 buyers at 5 dollars, thats 5 thousand dollars right there. Now say you get 5 cents a view on your animation. Youd need 500,000 or 500x more primary consumers for the same gain. The yield per consumer is just not as good. People dont pay much to watch animation. People pay a good bit to play games though.
Oop sorry seems these two seconds of your animation were claimed by vladimir turnipkosvsky's ten subscriber channel most of that 500,000 views money is going to him.
In terms of the art/animation itself, it's because there's a higher "budget floor" since the average animation framerate requires about 500 images per minute, which adds up damn quick if you're planning on an animation longer than 60 seconds.
In indie games, it's a lot easier to reuse animations. You can reuse the same three attack animations the whole game, or you can loop the same walk/run animations the whole game. Have a fight with 10 guys? Just copy the same guy 10 times. Want to fight an army of a thousand? Copy him 1000 times (and stagger their appearance so they don't melt the PC, of course.)
Engagement, cost of production is one thing, but engagement is another.
People pay tops what, 20 dollars for a movie ticket? That's even being generous. Unless they go to some gimmick theatre that offers an experience.
Blu-rays, people will pay 10-20 for a movie, wait for it on sale to own the ability to play it again and again.
Indie games still have gameplay you engage with. Animation you watch will never have that same engagement, you're watching it. Videogames you're controlling it, in whatever way it's set up to navigate through the story rather than ride through the story.
People are willing to pay for an experience they hadn't had before that they can engage with. Indie games can offer that, it's a lot harder for indie animation to offer something you can't get watching a higher budget project that pulls it off better and longer.
Videogames are also just exponentially more popular than animation is.
Animation in the mainstream honestly still gets looked at as if it's for kids. You're going to have trouble finding as much of a market. Of course there's adult animation and those are popular, but like you say, when you go that route, it's kind of hard to offer something that a bigger isn't going to do better.
A lot of what people are impressed by are production values rather than the content. If you have an epic score, voice acting and consistent animation, people will be impressed. But it's harder to compare to big budget studios in that regard
>it's a lot harder for indie animation to offer something you can't get watching a higher budget project that pulls it off better and longer.
You're saying that as if that couldn't apply to most indie games as well.
It actually applies better to video games.
>you can't get watching a higher budget project that pulls it off better and longer.
haven't seen any mainstream modern comedic adult animation that looks/moves as good as vivzie's stuff, maybe outside of some obscure european movies
is vivzie's stuff still considered indie? I'd imagine budgets grew quite high and they're going to be on Amazon Prime soon.
I genuinely have no clue though
>is vivzie's stuff still considered indie?
HB is, at least.
hb yes hh no
The pilot definitely was. Majority of the animators and background artists did it for free. The budget went entirely to the voices and music.
>Majority of the animators and background artists did it for free
Shit, really? Why? I can get believing in a project, but animators generally hate working for free especially across a long special
Networking and an oppurtunity to add a big name project to your resume and portfolio, The industry to pretty cutthroat and there are only so many oppurtunities, especially with major animation studios such as CN scaling down if no being closed downright. I love animation and hope to be good enough to be at a professional level someday but I can't imagine relying on it for income.
>Networking and an oppurtunity to add a big name project to your resume and portfolio,
Aren't those the exact things that get mocked by artists when a potential employer presents them with those as incentives?
I guess the comic explains it better than I could
, but I thought generally they were very against it since it seems exploitive so I'm surprised they worked on Helluva for free
She dumped them, didn't she?
huh
Damn, you're telling me a studio can eliminate three quarters of their shows' costs by replacing animators with AI? No wonder they're trying so hard to get it working.
They could save so much more if they replace the voice actors with AI instead.
You made her cry. Shame on you.
Games are more interactive
For me, animation quality/art direction is to cartoons what gameplay is to games. You can have the crappiest character writing or plot imaginable, and a majority of animation does, but if I like the art direction and/or the animation then frick the former aspects. It's not like I'm reading a novel, after all.
Reading a bunch of useless NEETs complain about Zeurel's budget is funny. Even moreso when they think they're qualified to discuss topics like finance and balancing a budget. If you didn't read the price tag on hot pockets you wouldn't know things cost money at all. Get the frick out.
>execs wives boyfriends have bigger dicks.
You only hear of the 1% of indie games that made it.
This. So many indie projects get zero attention. It's like they don't exist.
The difference is that there was no indie animation that made it until very recently
The causes are pretty much the same at the end however: those that made it big had plenty of help to make it so.
>but I can't imagine relying on it for income.
I think both it and gamedev should be purely a hobby for those without the necessary connections/resources.
depends what you mean by made it
youtube and the like have had plenty of successes on there
By made it I mean financial success. How many indie animations (outside of story times) allowed the creators to make a reasonable amount of money?
Very few because 1 person is unlikely to be able to put out the kind of output to make a reasonable amount of money
Even a small team
But to make money itself and do well off it, I think a fair few will have done that
Artists think they are worth 5 figure salaries when doing what every single 5 year old does. Even if they are not even employed and doing something on the side. They want $$$ coming in because they are alive.
You buy games. You don't buy a youtube video.
Black person, most indie games fail hard. You get indie devs who are saved from destitution because someone like Sseth or Mandalore makes a video about them. But because there are no guarantees you sometimes get quirky one man projects that explode, like that Lethal Company thing. That was made by a barely adult furry who never saw it coming. The only clear example I know of an indie dev playing the market is that Choo Choo Charles dev, who purposefully made a game he knew would meme well, and then put in a lot of effort to make it go viral.
It's fascinating how quickly the preception of industry careers went from "omg your famous" to "these people abuse kids and indie projects are the future".
Indie has always been the ideal way to go, people used to take industry deals because they were worth the trade off. As the desire to make more “content” went up, the need to cost cut did as well, and suddenly things like royalties, marketing, sometimes being on the front page when your work got released went with it. Working in the industry is great to develop your skills and make connections for when you eventually go indie, but people are doing it more now since the the big corps aren’t making an effort to try and actually retain their talent.
That comic is more about small time commission work as a freelancer. You still have a paycheck, bonuses, etc when you work in the industry.
>Indie has always been the ideal way to go
Then why do they still take industry jobs when the opportunity arises?
Money.
That’s it
Indie allows you to have absolute creative control and the rights to shop around your idea for merchandising and tie ins if people want to buy them, but you have to do a lot to make an indie project work especially if you’re working out of pocket.
Companies have money. They will pay you money to work and to buy your idea. You might get money afterwards via royalties, though again, that shit becomes increasingly difficult to get, but they simply have more money to offer than going indie your first time, and you need money to afford basic necessities like food and a roof. It’s the same reason people were taking the sweetheart deals Epic Games did a bit back despite their storefront being absolute ass to this day.
People are willing to pay for games but expect animation to get handed to them for free.
What are so “cheaply” made cartoons that still look good and are hand drawn?
because cartoons are completely story-driven, and westerners can only make woke stories today whereas indie games dont need a certain concrete story and can curb woke shit
>because cartoons are completely story-driven
Like Big City Sneeds and Bluey?
How hard would it be to get an indie animated movie into streaming?
I don't mean getting funding for it, just selling the rights to stream it or something like that after the movie is ready.
Ten birrion dorrar
Made me search for Asian Dr. Evil.
if "the misty green sky" can get on a streaming service i'm sure you could make something that could get picked up too.
Quite a few indie game developers are actually backed by large publishers.
Dave the Diver was a big example being labeled indie even when the devs are a subsidiary of Nexon, which has almost a billion dollars in income in 2021.
Taking that into account, why is HH not indie again?
because dave the diver isn't indie
So the term basically became something of a marketing buzzword.
yeah pretty much, it was never especially well defined
I wonder how expensive TADC was.
IIRC Glitch's budgets are in the $300-500k range per episode
Don't know if that's US or Australian dollars though
Sorry for sounding like a moron here but how would drawing rough animation cells in flash cost thousands of dollars?
Because it's made in California and the oppressed animators deserve to be paid for doing next to nothing, chud.
No I meant the section about the rough and clean sketches. If you already have Flash on your PC, how would it cost money to draw thousands of dollars for a indie project
Because artists are greedy morons and think theyre entitled to thousands of dollars for drawing ten frames of animation
Animation is tedious, not hard. If you dont have five breaks per shift and you arent dicking around on discord you should be getting a lot more done in a day
Well, 60 seconds times 12 FPS (animating on twos) is 720 frames.
Monkey Wrench is animated frame by frame mostly, but let's say they only need 200 unique drawings for those 720 frames, either with tweening, stills, or lower framerates.
If it's $1250 for those 200 drawings, the artist is getting $6.25 per rough sketch.
Let's say an animator can draw a frame in 15 minutes on average. That would be $25 per hour, but ONLY when they're actively working. There's no such thing as pooping on company time here.
These animators are freelancers, so that $25 per hour also needs to cover the costs of health insurance, taxes, equipment, and living during the inevitable work drought once the job's over.
For comparison, I'm a junior software engineer at a large company. My salary averages out to around $60 per hour plus benefits and stock, and I'm barely competent. I certainly don't draw a rough frame every 7 minutes for that $60.
You can't get someone to buy something while watching a video.
Monkey Wrench episode 3 was kino
There was a third episode?
Games are sold directly to the consumer. Developers make money on sales of the game.
Animation is ultimately sold to platforms or advertisers. It's a different beast entirely.
>Animation is ultimately sold to platforms or advertisers
well it's more complicated than that, especially with indie shows adopting a funding model of selling merch direct to the consumer
>Developers make money on sales of the game.
Depend on how much of a cut any third-party entities who helped publish the game (if any) takes for themselves.
The problem is distribution. Originally you needed to sell your soul to a big company to screen your film now you need to sell your soul to a big company to stream your film.
Past that you can't viral market a film because when someone watches your movie and "reacts" to it, the person watching the influencer who watched your film already essentially saw your film. Your only other option is to strike the influencer for copyright which angers the influencer's fan base.
It's just a bad situation all around unless someone comes out with some really innovative distribution platform for independent films that can capture the attention of the average consumer.
>which angers the influencer's fan base.
That implies most film companies give a shit about the feelings of who's mostly a bunch of randies. I mean, we're not talking Pewdiepie or Cr1tikal here.
they don't until it leads to negative press, and then they do
it's just an unnecessary bother
AI will fix this nobody will ever need to hand animate the boring time consuming bits ever again
I think I know a good use case for AI for you in particular.
Pathetic. And you wonder why nobody cares about your "suffering" industry
It came directly out of Homestuck and was riding the wave of enthusiasm of what was coming out of that project. But that died off gradually because in 2014 I went into isolation because the homestuck Community abused me for being a Catholic while my best friend was working on it.
Keep your animation writer nonsense to yourself, you people abused me enough when I was a minor in the animation community, don't need to lie about my story too
The only pathetic thing here is the fact you break down anytime anyone mentions the fact you raped your niece. AI can’t undo that
Boil you can prowl around here for decades telling people to commit suicide and it won't make anyone like you one iota and calling my emails "breaking down" won't stop me from punishing you by sending them or dampen my conviction to send them.
You're the dip shit fruit of the animation industry showing it needs to die.
Where's your art, guy?
That's why I'm switching to AI animation. Twitter homosexuals can blow me.
indieslop is easy when the hardest work has already been done with free engines and you're using past gen graphics, plus a devoted following of morons to give you the benefit of the doubt because you're the little guy making cute indie games and sticking it to the big AAA anti-art corpos
meanwhile AI gays want to turn animation into another assembly line shit they can exploit for a quick buck.
t. Never heard of the indiepocalypse in games
qrd?
I'll let the common https://Cinemaphile.org/vg/agdg demoralisation post speak for itself:
>40 to 60 games release on Steam alone EACH DAY.
>About 350 games in the week around your release.
>AAA release? Successful release AAA or indie, in your genre? BOOM you are done.
>Also, not only are you competing with other new releases, but the entire backlog of games on every system a player owns. 🙂
>Take all the "indie success stories" you can think of in the past 10 years and divide it by the number of devs in that time who have tried (again, 50 games a day, 1500 a month) and there's your historical likelihood of "making it."
>Steam cut, higher self-employment taxes, no benefits, no retirement, AND to top it all off: Your sales diminish over time, so even if you hit this "mediocrity lottery" you'll have to do it all over again in a couple years.
Not only this, but the medium is FULL to the brim with publisher frickheads like David Szymanski larping as indie and taking all the attention away from the actual starving artists. The game awards this year ignored fantastic stuff like Pizza Tower in favour of games published by huge companies such as Nexon. If you don't pay literally $100,000+ per trailer at events like TGAs then you will get deliberately ignored by the entire industry, and likely join the piles of buried games on steam with 20 sales ever.
Some of my favourite games of all time only made around $2,000 because that's just how fricked gamedev is for indies.
Meanwhile, it seems like every single animation on youtube gets crazy success. ENA episodes must be child's play to make compared to making an actual game, which is why their videogame "ENA: Dream BBQ" is taking fricking forever to make and delaying their regular animation uploads despite the fact that the regular episodes seem very similar to a game, and intuitively feel like they should easily translate to a game.
Basically every youtuber that tries to get into gamedev crashes and burns.
The only reason animation is even viable right now is because youtube pays you some money for millions of views. But youtube is floundering enough to attack adblock users after almost 20 years of operation. I think they've actually always been operating at a loss but since google bought them out they're just trying to retain video platform supremacy. The second YouTube stops payout, indie animation will tank. Which they've already been trying to cut back on by tightening their terms of use and cracking down on monetization privileges. I don't know where animators will turn. Merch is harder to sell, patreon maybe if you can churn out new stuff every day/week to satisfy subscribers. No clue but for all the problems games have, animation is really hanging by a thread itself
you know, this might sound crazy, but you alone pick the budget of the show
People don't buy cartoons like they buy games, simple as. The smart route is publishing houses commissioning cartoons for their graphic novels which, does actually work and people do buy in droves. But that kind of investment involves a little risk and Americucks don't like that.
Even in Japan Studios who focus on OC like Trigger do Licensed shit purely because they would be bankrupt otherwise
Animation is a heavily risky industry, it relied on other industries like Toys/Comics/Manga for a reason.
This is why you do everything yourself. S9 you don't have to pay anyone
>Why is it so hard for indie animation to make money compared to indie games?
?t=3
Indie animators tend to be queer girls with wonky-ass lesbian/gay ideas that nobody really wants, so mainstream success is low. Indie game producers are 99% MEN, far more normal, and as opposed to giving people their internalized crap as girls do and demanding they like it, they produce things other men, the core demographic for games, might actually want to consume..
>Indie game producers are 99% MEN
YOU GOT THAT RIGHT, CHIEF
>Indie animators tend to be queer girls with wonky-ass lesbian/gay ideas that nobody really wants
I dunno dude even their stuff can have have silver linings even most of the big indie games lack.
I think the thing Zuerel sucks at the most is the marketing side of his series.
>People clamor about wanting plushies of the black cat, the most popular monkey Wrench character
>Use black cat as marketing stunt to sell plushies of the two ugly MCs
>When finally time to make plushie of the cat, pair him with another character instead of just by himself
>Now struggles to sell plushies of the most popular character because he baited people too long and put him alongside a character no one cares about.
The show would be way more popular if the cat was a protagonist alongside the other 2.
too close to 500 to not get it
10 dollars to play an indie game
Three advertisements (or zero :^) at less than one cent to watch an indie animation
Support indie patreons if you have the money and the desire.
Consider that most people who watch indie animation on youtube will watch several series from several different youtubers in a day. For most games, people buy one game and then expect it to entertain them for over a week, often leaving a negative review (that deboosts your games visibility) if it doesn't give them the 50 hours of gameplay they wanted. In that time, they could've watched 150 animation pilots. Now you see why you're far more likely to attain success as an animator, so so so many more people are giving you a shot on a daily basis. And there are far less quality animations on youtube than there is demand, whereas there are too many fantastic games to ever finish in your lifetime, so it's a competition to be seen more than all the other perfectly great games that overfill the demand.
Yeah, it's annoying that you can't really "extend" threads without making a new one and having everyone call you a moron for it, if only you could keep them alive for longer.