Sounds like a good idea and you have enough to cover the basics with your list.
Most pixel artists are weak on the sales dept and other forms of artist management and handling so if you can add some sort of in-between service maybe even for bigger projects or when a client may want to use one lead or major artist that would be great.
Most general artist management/agents/agencies are not fully versed on the technicalities of pixelart and quoting or even just determining the scope of almost any commission is scary for the less experienced. This type of service can be liberating for the artist (freedom to create) and $$ generating for you (baby's college).
Make sure you keep us posted on the progress and if you need a news item/announcement let us know when you're ready.

Edited by jalonso - 26 July 2014 at 11:41am

Very stupid idea. A lot of pixel art uses black. For example, your avatar. If we replace all the black in the image by hot pink (common placeholder for transparency), we get this:

Which is completely screwed up.

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I also dont agree on price standardization. Have a look at some of the edits I made for PJ;


They all use the (approximate) same amount of pixels and colors in the original (left) and my final edit (rightmost) version. But I'd argue that there is a definite difference in quality. What you're advocating will lead to people inflating their pixel counts and their palettes, making sloppier large pixel art because it will be 'worth' more. This is counter to the whole idea of pixel art.

And no. Bigger doesn't take longer than smaller. It can, sure, but it's not definitive. Compare painting a wall with painting the mona lisa.

Quality and value can not be accurately calculated by an algorithm. There can be some indicative things (ramp curves, outline consistency, noise/detail/rest) but those would be much more complex algorithms, and they would still be merely rough indicators.

Let humans decide value.

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It might be interesting to do something with pricing, though. For example making kits more expensive the more they get bought; this will reward early birds with a lower price, and motivate clients to look at alternative kits (this both levels the playing field for artists a bit, as well as keep games feeling more unique). Or do what's more common and use price skimming, where an unused set is more expensive, to make (initual) uniqueness a higher value, and have prices drop once the artist has recouped his time a bit.

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Making a library with single-use licenses is death to the system. Artists would make art with a chance at a single compensation. There would be a high chance that it never gets sold, and thus all the work would be for naught. It's like working for a client that says they "will judge in the end", and it's one of the biggest pitfalls in freelancing. (yes, I've made this mistake, once.)

So you'd have to make the prices higher for it to be worthwhile for artists, but then the prices are so high that no clients will want to buy. Those that have enough funds tend not to go through a store looking for sprites, but hire an artist outright, to make something custom.

And lastly, you're cannibalizing your own inventory. As the site gets popular and you make more sales, you also remove more and more sprites.

There's a reason why multi-use libraries work well; they're cheap. It might not be worthwhile to buy unique sprites for $1000 for a game, but $200 sounds a lot nicer. You might not get the most original look, but then again, it's only a tree sprite or a grass tileset. If you want to have a more unique look you can always hire the original artist to supplement you with a dash of custom sprites/tiles. On the flipside, for the artist it means they would have a more steady stream of lower income, which is a lot safer, and they could have better insight as to what clients like and create additional packs.


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I do think that standardization is key within a grand library like this, though. Ideally you want clients to be able to buy sprites from several artists and combine them without issue. This means that clients have more choice, you're less dependant on a single artist, artists can specialize, make supplements, and overall be more free. These standardizations should originate from the store and not from the individual pixel artist; though it would be wise to ask a committee for input as a developer might miss some details that spriters stumble in to.

For restrictions and standard, I would look at what's commonly out there, and base around that. So you'd have sprites of 16², 32² and 64² pixels. You'd have sprite-palettes of 4, 8, 16 and 32 colors. You'd have several fixed palettes to choose from. You'd have a toggle for outlines, for proportions, for gradients vs cel-shaded, for a specific viewpoint indeed. But very importantly; you would have templates.

Even if we say 'isometric' there are two options for tilesets;

Though actually, most games would still use rectangular sprites. And there are some heretics that actually use 3 pixels for the top corner. So, lots of different possibilities, and sprite sets wouldn't work together as nicely as you'd like.

And when before I mentioned outlines... how thick? are we talking black outlines? Selout? Colored outlines? There's a lot to be standardized.

The trickiest part, when it comes to art, categorizing, standardizing, will likely be to strike a good balance. You'll want to have enough variety in format (perspective, size, color, style) but you also want enough depth per format so that you can combine a full A possible option; build a strong 32² platform set and a 32² iso set for example. Then later you can expand with 64² bosses which would then expand into a full 64² set.

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It might also be useful to look work more with preview images. Clients might not understand things such as sel-out. So give them visual representations of styles, sizes, genre. Something like this;


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I've long been thinking of starting my own site and putting a lot of kits online (though more as a personal store than a multi-artist one), so hit me up if you wanna talk things through and work together in some way.