Well, the standard I used for measuring the amounts was a rough hourly rate -- if the artists could make more money working at McDonald's in the amount of time they devoted to creating the artwork, then I couldn't really say I paid them a whole lot. Granted this was offset by the fact that making said artwork was probably much more fun and ...

And the final entry in this series is now up: "In total there were 12 spell icons, 12 status effect icons and 8 portraits, with a bit of palette-swapping/layering to cut down on the work. Alice was quite comfortable with this and we paid her $200 for all the ...

If you guys are interested, here are two more posts in the series: "What quickly became apparent is that most pixel artists judged the budget of a work strictly by the amount of pixels it involved. What this meant is that the price tag of an image grew exponentially with its sizes. For example, if a 50×50 image cost $10, a 100×100 image ...

Tribes of Mexica by Incubator Games. Website: http://www.incubatorgames.com/ToM/ Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDK98HE_rkA

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it. And yeah, there's a lot of talented artists out there, so I was hoping to provide some concrete info on how I contracted 'em that other developers might find useful.

Just thought that some of you might find this post interesting: "What I asked for were two illustrations in a painterly style — one for a boxart mockup, and another for the game’s title screen. I had some rough ideas for their compositions, but I didn’t dwell on those. Instead, I focused on details such as: theme, compensation ($200 USD, ...

Why is that, though? Even with images one can alter the alpha value of their colour overlay to do fading, and aren't SpriteFonts just another texture?

I have a quick question: Is SpriteBatch.DrawString()'s Color parameter even used when the passed font is not wholly white? Tinting and fading (by altering the alpha value of the passed color) seems to work fine on custom fonts that are basically just outlines. However, that's not the case with edited spritefonts that have a border, ...

Very cool, and the rankings are a nice touch. I think most everyone is waiting for an official XNA implementation, but it's still useful for a webapp.

Perhaps, although I was also using a very low maximum velocity (roughly 0.2 as it was radian-based), which gave me some issues in the past. I suppose I should just scale it to avoid these rounding errors... Anyway, I also posted this question on Stack Overflow and got some good responses if anyone's interested.