Replacement for Charas graphics

As pointed in a previous comment, most of characters in Charas Project are in fact ripped from RPG Maker. Obviously, I cannot take the chance to use those for the final product.

Problem is that I'm far from being a pixel artist and that my budget is quite limited to hire an artist. I'm still waiting for quotes from an artist...

After drawing a few characters by myself (that was real ugly), Maple suggested to go with stick figures. The idea was a good one. Instead of trying to draw something that would look bad in the end, why not go all the way down with something simple.

While I think it's a good idea, I'll keep it as last resort. My concerns are first that Kingdom of Loathing already did it and that without the humor factor I think it might fails. The second one is that I already have all the arts I need for buildings, trees and such and I'm not sure that would fit unless I completely redraw the whole thing to fit stick figures. The last concern is that while this might work, I must honestly say I was hoping for something better.

So I went back to Photoshop and gave it another try with the help of a few tutorials. After spending more time that I was hoping, I think I finally come to an acceptable result.

It's surely not as good as those in Charas Project (I'm having a hard time doing hair right and the walking seems a bit odd though it doesn't look that bad when it's animating) and miles away from what an artist could do but I'm starting to feel a bit comfortable with it.

I'll probably keep the number of hairs, faces, suits, ... low for now since it's taking quite some time to do but I'm hoping that with time, I'll either come across and artist willing to help or that players will start drawing their own characters. I'm planning to add a clothes system later so players won't be stuck with what they chose at first.


So here's some samples. If anyone have some advices or can even help a bit or know someone that would, I'd greatly appreciate that. Budget is low but if an artist could make me 3 different sets of everything for under $100, that would be a start. From there I could probably even make new sets from the one made by the artist.





Here's the frame I made to start the work