Sprites different from CG's

[ririruetoo]

I have a question I've been meaning to ask lately. For my next VN, I was thinking of hiring a different artist for the sprites and another one for the CG's. The two I am planning to hire have completely different art styles (one cartoony, the other slightly more realistic). I was just wondering if people would care if I went with that decision, do you think the different art between sprite and cg's would effect your gameplay, or would you not care?

[Desu_Cake]

Depends on where/how often you plan to use the CGs. If there's going to be a lot of them, used along with the sprites, I'd say to have them both in the same style. If there's meant to be a distinction between regular scenes and CG scenes, then it doesn't matter as much.

[papillon]

Having often worked with a mix of artists (and in fatal hearts there were some wild style variations), some people will care, others won't. Of course, you can say that about most choices you make in a game!

There will definitely be people who will complain about it, but lots of people will manage anyway.

[leon]

Personally I don't mind, especially if it's like Desu_cake said, but...

I made a somewhat similar thread recently. I was asking whether people prefer high resolution 3D or low res handdrawn BGs. Almost everyone seems to prefer handrawn and consider sticking to one style more important than the quality of that style.

[tigersmurf]

It doesn't bother me at all unless they are wildly different for no apparent reason. As long as it isn't distracting, I wouldn't mind slightly different art styles.

[MiSi]

Of course it always looks neater, when CGs and sprites match, but if the styles are not completely the opposite of each other, then I think it doesn't matter if they look different. The two artists should know the body/face features of the characters similarly well, though. So you can recognize the characters in both their art styles. Maybe they should discuss a bit about their pictures, pointing out, what makes each character specific...

[ririruetoo]

Well what I'm thinking is that the sprites will look cartoony, and the CG's will look realisitic (somewhat anyways). I really love both the art styles, and I think realistic CG's would match the novel better than the way the sprites look. But then its still in a creative process, so the end result may be totally different. But based on my thinking now, I would like to hear your guys thoughts.

[OtomeWeekend]

er, I don't really mind------

Though it's kinda weird if there is a total bloody gap between the sprite's style and the CG's. I mean, to the fact that you need to question if "are they really the same person?" and rant all the time you see it. Particularly and obviously the reason why one would stick to only one artist then use different colorist instead which is a better choice i think.

[Keilis]

I dunno, I kind of don't like having two separate styles. It feels extremely inconsistent and makes it jarring when I'm playing. Of course, it's not like it's going to be a full-blown marketed game for the public, but I like consistency. Maybe have one person do regular backgrounds and the backgrounds in CGs, and have the other artist draw sprites and the characters in the CGs? That way, backgrounds look the same in both regular play and CGs, and characters look consistent in both regular play and CGs.

Basically, don't think of them as spriter/CGer, but as background artist/character artist? Just a suggestion, though. Like for FF7, I felt the transitions from FMVs to the character polygons were pretty terrible and interrupted the flow of the scenes.

[Elze]

I guess it depends on how jarring the differences are. If we're looking at Uta no prince-sama's style for the sprites and Marvel's spiderman style for the CGs, I'd say it'd be very disturbing to play the VN since we'll be constantly noticing the blatantly obvious distinctions in style. Needless to say, it is generally preferable to have one artist do both the sprites and CGs, but in many cases it's more efficient to split up the job. As long as the two styles don't clash too much and lie within the same genre or type (for example, a cute style or a serious style, etc) it should be fine. If you can, try to get artists with similar styles so that the effect will be less jarring. For example, hanako games' Date Warp used a different sprite and CG artist, and while I can tell that they're done by different people, the style is similar enough to not be striking or annoying, and a less observant player probably wouldn't even have noticed.

Perhaps you can show us visual examples of both styles?