Lemma Soft Forums

Because I'm planing on making a commercial game I would like to have an idea of how many backgrounds other commercial games normally have, if anybody could tell me I would appreciate it!

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We are doing... 26? Around 26 I think for BCM. I can't remember the exact number XP

But backgrounds totally depend on the setting of your game, so it doesn't actualy allude to quality. You have as many as you need to tell the story.

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The other 1/2 of Cyanide Tea l My Deviantart Account I My Tumber Account I Break Chance Memento I Ristorante Amore

I think you can get a way with just a few backgrounds as long as the story is limited in scope to a few locations. Just make sure you have day/night or weather conditions to give a change of ambience.

The question you should be asking, is how many CGs commercial games have.

The lowest I've seen around these parts was around 11 CGs (Go! Go! Nippon). This is already inching very close to freeware releases such as Re:Alistair (9 if I remember correctly). I'm talking about base poses here.

When it comes to that kind of stuff, there's no real standard- it all depends on your game.

Before thinking of how many BGs, sprites, CGs or anything, you should make the story and write the script to see what you'll need first. Say, if the story takes place at a boarding school for the entire game, you may just need BG's of the school and nothing else.

Don't even think about art assets before having a solid story... You may change things and have wasted time (and/or money) on assets you will not need. It's happened to me before and it's quite frustrating- I had to learn the hard way

It goes both ways. You may find that just by a quick re-editing to delete a paragraph and rewriting to reuse other locations, you may find you won't need this unique BG after all. That's something game makers who utilize off-the-shelf stock assets have... they look first at what's available, then decide if it's enough to tell their story.

If I know I'm only going to have 2 basic settings (a school, a mansion, or whatever) and 12 CGs, then I most definitely know I won't need 10 romanceable characters and 30 side characters. So yes, knowing how much art you would need (roughly) beforehand affects your story. I often find myself combining the plot roles and motivations of what used to take multiple characters and finding that a single more efficient character is able to exhibit all those traits -- the net benefit being that single character ends up being deeper and more convincing as a result.

All the more if you're making a commercial game, you want to NOT be surprised at the costing. For example, I used to want as many locations as possible for my RPG (the more the merrier of course!) but after the artist quote I had to cut back and figure out ways to reuse assets more effectively.

So best suggestion would be start with the outline first.

Ah thanks I actually was asking just out of curiosity. At this stage I already can figure out the most basic bg's I need, but who knows I might need more once getting the actual story line set out.

@Auro-Cyanide: What setting is your game in I'm still curious about what others have for an amount of area's.

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Our game's got a Japanese urban setting. The main places are around the school/dormitories, but there are a lot of city BGs and whatnot. We really only have that many because part of our game revolves around exploring the map and looking for things, so we need more BGs to enhance that gameplay. (also a number of our 26 locations are just variations/tweaks of each other)

Honestly, it's up to you how many BGs you want to have. Auro and I are also planning a game that has only 3-4 BGs because that's just where all the action takes place. Like DaFool said, it's easy enough to delete/rewrite scenes to use pre-existing locations. There's a lot of scenes I've written/thought up and then tweaked so that I wouldn't have to force Auro to draw yet another BG just for that scene. So the BGs we have in the game now are all places that will be visited many times throughout the story.

I will tell you that, in general, BGs cost a lot. It costs a lot to buy the stock ones off of DLSite and it costs even more to commission someone to draw them. Most anime-style artists (and artists in general) hate drawing BGs, so they'll charge a lot for it if they do it at all. So in general unless you have an amazingly high budget, it'd be better to have only the BGs you really need to tell your story effectively. For that you'll really need to have your story written (or at least planned in detail) first.

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1/2 of Cyanide Tea | BCM | Ristorante Amore | The Elevator | @Twitter

Ah okay well I can honestly say my game probably will have a lot of BG's the setting is in a bording school with 7 main sections, 4 of those area's are dorms. The character gets to answer questions to decide what dorm their in you see. Besides that their is going to be about 8 romancable characters and then about 20 side characters, some you will be able to do friendship paths with.

Anyway knowing this how many BG's do you recomend?

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My guesstimate:

75~300 sprites
25~100 event cg
25~200 backgrounds

Oh my god. Let's look at the numbers for the bare minimum:

- Sprites: happy, sad, neutral, angry, annoyed, surprised/shocked
- Backgrounds: dorm room, hallway of dorm, dining room, school grounds with school building on background, classroom, hallway inside school, school cafeteria
- Event CGs: 8 romance endings, 10 friendship endings

That would get you these results:

Sprites: 6 x 28 = 168 sprites
Backgrounds: 7
Event CGs: 18
Routes/paths: 18
Wordcount: 10 000 (for a 50-60 minutes route) x 18 (paths) + 2500 (for the common route) = 182500

^That's without any area like a library or anything included, without any differences between the dorms, with 6 expressions for each character and one event CG for the 8 characters and 10 side characters.

Em, are you sure this is a good idea?

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Nanolife | Dev Blog | Pegasi's website | Twitter

Lol! Sorry you sounded shocked had to.

Making an estimate on how many BG's I'm going to need I would say it's around 50 to 70, to me the more bg's the more afect it adds to the game and attracts more attention. So yes it's a good idea and I have a friend that will do BG's and sprites for me for a cheap price, so I don't really have to worry to much about spending major loads of cash.

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Haha, well I am shocked. That's seriously a lot of resources and cash you'll be spending. If you find someone crazy enough to do 1 dollar per CG, you would still need to pay 50-70 dollars just for that. I don't even want to think about the total price for the sprites o_o'.

But, are 28 characters and 4 dorms really necessary in your story?

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Nanolife | Dev Blog | Pegasi's website | Twitter

Wait until you tell them that they'll be doing 50-70 BGs. Let's say you go for 50 and they do a background every single day (which is unlikely because of life) then it's still going to take them about 2 months. Just doing backgrounds. Every single day. I know you have worked on a project before, so it's probably a good idea to keep in mind on how the art progressed for them. It's not impossible, but it's unlikely to happen very quickly and it's a huge amount of pressure on one artist. I don't want to put you off doing the project that you want to do, but it is important to think about what is realistically possible and how the artists are going to feel about the work load. Especially since commercial games generally have to have a certain level of quality, it's going to be stressful. I would balk at this much work, it would take me over 2 years to do properly.

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The other 1/2 of Cyanide Tea l My Deviantart Account I My Tumber Account I Break Chance Memento I Ristorante Amore

Wait, wait... one person is doing both the sprites and the backgrounds for you @_@? That's impossible and plain cruel, listen to Auro-Cyanide.

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Nanolife | Dev Blog | Pegasi's website | Twitter

Well first yes four dorms are necessary, cause they all are different set up and have different type of people living in them. Here's a link to some info on the game: http://whatcardwillibe.blogspot.com/201 ... imasu.html
As for the amount of characters yes, because the game is inspired by Alice in wonderland (It will be way different!) their are roles that characters aim to become at the end of the year, like if one character was the Hatter of Hearts, he or she would be competing against the Hatter of Clovers, spades and diamonds to gain the title of Mad Hatter at the end of the game. Having only one character in a role for one role without making any others would be less boring and take competion away.

I know it would still be a lot of cash but compared to the average price it's really good, my friend said that she'll charge me only Haven't asked about CG price yet though.



Yeah one person but I wont be rushing her with it and she has said she it only takes her four hours to do one fully body sprite with color and shading. And progess for the game will estimated take a year to get it fully complete.

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