I need some help to understand something, but first of all I would like you to YouTube Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm.

I would like to develop a mobile game with graphics close to that game, but what I would like to know from you game artists is how long it would take for you to make the graphics of that game..

So let's just say you needed to make a new version of Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm for iOS and Android, how long would it take you to make the graphics.

1. The characters.

* Maybe it would make sense to look at one character at a time?

* By characters I also mean attacks. (I think for example jump, kick, punch, combos and all that is part of the character design process?)

2. The levels

* Maybe it would make sense to look at one level at a time?

I need to understand how much time goes into something like that, only then I know how I should look for game artists to develop a game for me.

# I forget to say that I'm only talking about 1vs1 mode, so no story mode.

That company seems to have worked on it with 134 employees, 8 of which are experienced artists for 2 years.

So assuming 700 working days, they worked (very) roughly 5600 hours of art development.

An amateur team would take much longer than this.

I will say that for each character a day or two, this includes time fixing mistakes noticed after the model is done. This is meshes and textures only, the character wouldn't move at this point. Now I can't really say for the animation and that was some impressive fast paced animation, a rough guess would say about six to twelve hours per animation.

The levels is more about the amount of props in one than as a whole, but say five days for the assets used in the background of a single level.

Note this is only the visual elements, coding level design and other things excluded.

You probably want to look at a core character, which will be fully animated, then establish the cast of characters with cosmetic modifications of this core.

That company seems to have worked on it with 134 employees, 8 of which are experienced artists for 2 years.

So assuming 700 working days, they worked (very) roughly 5600 hours of art development.

An amateur team would take much longer than this.

I have contacted them also, but their game is for consoles and has much more gameplay on top of that.. but of course I understand what I am asking isn't going to be done in a couple of days.

I will say that for each character a day or two, this includes time fixing mistakes noticed after the model is done. This is meshes and textures only, the character wouldn't move at this point. Now I can't really say for the animation and that was some impressive fast paced animation, a rough guess would say about six to twelve hours per animation.

The levels is more about the amount of props in one than as a whole, but say five days for the assets used in the background of a single level.

Note this is only the visual elements, coding level design and other things excluded.

Okay, you have caught me off guard with the "animation".. you mean with animation for example the character giving a punch? And like they did with the movie Avatar, each frame needs to be created and by each frame you mean animation?

You probably want to look at a core character, which will be fully animated, then establish the cast of characters with cosmetic modifications of this core.

At this moment I'm dreaming, meaning that I have a lot of ideas in my mind.. and now I'm trying to figure out what is possible and what not.

To even reach further, I want to give the player the options to adjust their character by adjusting clothes, eye colours etc.

I'll stay on this thread to understand everything what I should understand before bothering artists and programmers.

Thanks everybody for your time to answer me, I hope you will continue answering my questions.. for example I should have known what sunandshadow was talking about I guess.

To add more inf. about the game:

So what I already understood is that for example when the player form a word of 5 letters he will be rewarded with a certain attack and this certain attack needs to be designed as sunandshadow said. Isn't it?

So aside from designing characters, the artist(s) should also design every attack? Frame by frame that is?

So aside from designing characters, the artist(s) should also design every attack? Frame by frame that is?

These days very little art is drawn this way. Generally, a model is produced either as 3D (e.g. blender etc) or as 2D with skeletal animation. The frames are then captured as simple 2D images of the 3D model. This saves on doing tons of redrawing to get the movements correct.

To do this properly with fighting moves, you'd need to invest in motion capture which can be expensive. This is a different skill set to just art too.

Not sure how on-topic this is, but I found a toon shading tutorial a while ago. As far as 3D rigging and animation goes (Blender), it's really not very difficult. You'll spend the most time making the actual model. After that, all you have to do is pose your characters like an action figure and save the positions. Animation between poses is done automatically...

If you're interested, here are two rigging tutorials I found useful [Tutorial #1] [Tutorial #2].