About fighting games development process

[Whatever]

Hello, everybody!
As you all probably can see, I'm a new member, so I apologize in advance if I make any mistakes.  
 
I'd like to introduce myself briefly, beforehand. I suggest you to skip this and the next paragraphs, if you're not in a very patient mood, 'cause I feel like this will be a long post and what I'm going to write won't add too much to the discussion. Anyway, so, I've always been interested in the process of making games and, for about six years, I've always had this desire of making my own fan-project. I'm still quite young, only 20 years old, and my 14 years old self wasn't aware of how much work is put into making a merely decent game. And money.
 
Now, I'm quite aware that, currently, it's impossible to start any project, for I lack experience and, especially, money. However, I still want to, eventually, when I find myself in better conditions, do my own projects, but with more realistic ambitions. Instead of doing full games, I'd be more than happy with making a few MUGEN characters, for example. For now, I'm asking purely out of curiosity.
 
So, finally, moving to what matters, the particular case I'd like to bring up as an example is the Skullgirls development cost. This is an old subject, but I couldn't find any thread about it. If the question has been discussed in a previous occasion, I'd be happy to read all about it. Anyway, when I first saw that the average cost per character was above 150.000USD, I got naturally shocked. 
 
Even though some other AAA game companies said that this was cheap, Skullgirls is remarkably expensive for an indie game: The characters were made from scratch; they used traditional 2D techniques, instead of rotoscoping 3D models; the sprites are enormous etc.
As I plan to use already existing characters, many of these issues would be alleviated. And I don't want to get too ahead of myself, so I'll focus here on The Staff and Animation Contracting. Those two alone make up for 78.000USD, more than half of the overall cost. That's obviously a huge amount. 
 
I'm particularly curious about the following aspects: How much do you, spriters, charge for you work? Is it per frame or per hour? How much should I be willing to pay to have a small-sized, but polished spritesheet? This last question would depend on too many factors, such as the sprite size, style and all that stuff, so imagine “Capcom vs SNK 2/Garou: Mark of the Wolves” style just as a model.
 
Well, that’s it. I look forward for your answers and wish everyone a nice day!

[Gors]

this is in the wrong section.

moving

[Whatever]

Oh, ok! Thank you, Gors.
I guess that I won't receive any proper reply, sadly. :/
Do you think that MUGEN has a bad reputation here or it may have been for another reason?

[Skyla Doragono]

I personally have a love/hate relationship with MUGEN. Love it in that it makes making a fighting game easy, hate it because of what you need to do to get to that point. XD

But it's a good practice for starting out! There are still several MUGEN communities that have pre-made fighters that you can just drop into your game (with a little easy editing of course).

[Kosheh]

Oof. I can't give you an exact answer because it's not the type of stuff that I do, but older Capcom fighting games (like SF2, Final Fight) actually made characters by piecing a few different body part "sprites" together to make one big sprite - and most spriters from what I've seen on the Internet (well, the older days of TSR) will usually pay by the sprite, rather than by the hour.

I'd try highballing it (see how much it would cost generally to make map character sprites, per sprite) and double or triple that price and see what happens. I mean, as the requester, you'd want to figure out how much you want to ideally spend on each character and see if that's acceptable. Take a look at like an SF character's spritesheet to see what the minimum would be.

I mean the good news that you'd PROBABLY be able to get a character spritesheet made for MUGEN for far, FAR less than a Skullgirls character. Expect it to be high, but like still fairly high for your teenage wallet ($65~145 tops) and not Skullgirls high. Hell, it probably won't be that high lmao but just be prepared.


I feel like 50 cents a sprite isn't too bad but that's just me

[Whatever]

I kind of have a love/hate relationship with MUGEN too, Mr. Skyla. Actually, my problem lies in what people do with it (overpowered, silly characters): I love 'polished' fighting game characters, and a lot of MUGEN creators create cheap instead of fun-to-use characters. But the engine itself is useful and beginner-friendly, so it's a God send to me.

Kosheh, thank you very much for your answer. Very informative and I'm actually pleasantly surprised with the average price you told me. I was getting prepared for much, much worse lol. You see, 65~145USD doesn't sound too bad in dollars, but, yeah, for my teenage wallet, and with the current situation of my country's currency (Brasil), that is just too expensive. I'd have to burn all the money from my internship to get just the spritesheet.

Plus, I find the animation technique used in SF2 and Final Fight kind of ugly in my eyes, but I should start with 'modest' ideas, I suppose. Something like SF3 is just too fancy for me right now. I think the animation issue is alleviated by the size and animation style of the sprite, right? 
Let me give an example: I really love Blazblue's art style, and the sprites are so pretty, but, say, the silk movement of Carl's cape kinda irks me, because it feels as if it requires some extra frames for the smoother animation it aims to achieve. Pocket Fighter, on the other hand, clearly 'skips' some transitory frames, but it looks very neat and enjoyable.

[StevenB]

If you want to commission complete MUGEn characters you could try asking some of the guys at the MugenGuild Forums, some of those do full-character commissions for, I believe, around 300 USD dollars. But that's just the art/animations, you'd still need a voice actor/coder for the character.

[Whatever]

I'll check that out, Steven. Thanks for the tip. The voice actor thing wouldn't be a problem, as I could use the voice files from other games. (like, say, Soul Calibur). 300USD is expensive for me now, but sounds more than fair for the job.

[Magma MK-II]

Some MUGEN creators also do commissions for coding as well.