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HappySqurriel on 20 November 2010
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Untamoi said:
HappySqurriel said:
noname2200 said:
HappySqurriel said:

The 3DS having increased development costs isn't that much of a surprise, but I suspect a lot of developers will avoid having to deal with that by producing more traditional sprite based games rather than push the limit of the 3DS.

From what I understand sprites, especially detailed sprites, can actually be more expensive to produce than low-poly models.


Yes and no ...

If you're creating games with (relatively) simple graphics and limited number of animations using sprites can be an order of magnitude less expensive than producing 3D models. The benefit of 3D is that after you have the model produced adding animations, changing the size or lighting conditions, or countless other features or effects is far cheaper than producing sprites to do the same thing.

Or to put this another way, as you try to produce a more and more visually impressive game there hits a point where it becomes less expensive to produce the game in 3D; but if you're trying to make the least expensive game possible it usually will be a game that uses 2D sprites. This is the reason why so many iPhone games still use sprites.


And hand-drawn 2D sprites cost more than most 3D models, especially after including animation. It all depends how you see it. And if you start to disagree with this, most games using 2D are not hand-drawn. Animated movies are mostly CGI (even 2D cartoons) and 3D because it is a lot cheaper than hand-drawn animations. Even if those animations are 2D.


I think you're not understanding what I am saying at all ... If you're even thinking of movie quality graphics and animations, or games produced by major publishers you've missed the point entirely.

 

There are more games being created today using 2D sprites that were created by being hand drawn or in photoshop than all other games combined. These are games made for the iPhone, Nintendo DS or flash and they're created in this way because it is much (MUCH) cheaper to produce this content in 2D than it is to produce these games in 3D.

Start browsing the iTunes library of games and looking at the graphics, roughly 90% of the games involve 2D graphics that were produced by hand or in a program like photoshop.

 

edit: I'll put it another way ...

One of the main reasons why comic books are still hand drawn is because it is far cheaper to produce comic books this way than it is to produce these in 3D. 1 good artist can produce a hand drawn graphical novel in less time than it would take a team of 10 modelers and animators to produce the same work. If you were to take that same graphical novel and convert it into a movie it would increase the work of the artist drawing by hand by (roughly) 100 to 500 times, while the 3D modelers and animators would see their work increase by 4 to 10 times.

There is a massive "overhead" to working in 3D that is often (much) greater than the scope of the entire project being worked on. On the other hand 2D projects do not scale well, and as a project grows you rapidly hit a break-even point between doing work in 2D or 3D; and soon after that it becomes much cheaper to work in 3D.