vbGore Free Online RPG Engine

(I'm not really sure if this is the right place for this, so I’ll just put it here for now )

And before I say anything, please no comments about "wtf are you paying that amount for, my friends cousins sister will do whatever you want for half that!", this is a very serious project and as such, the budget reflects this. We are not creating an MMO as such, rather something that a lot of the community will enjoy

Anyway, onto my questions.
A rough starter for what we need graphically;

Maps
Side scrolling maps, averaging at about 20x20 good sized tiles (not based on the vbGORE engine's tiles). We are looking for tile sets rather than individually designed maps. These sets should stick to standard themes; town, woodland, grassland, desert etc.
How many tiles really depends on how well the sets are designed. There will be 5 - 10 zones all sticking to one theme, but there needs to be enough variation to keep players entertained.
Map summery: Call it 7 zones worth out of each tile set, and 5 different sets should cover it to start.

Items
Weapons: 50 different weapons, ranging from staffs and swords to bows and axes, variation is the key here. All weapons will need animating as well as icons for the inventory, and similar icons for when they are dropped.
Armour: 15 items for each of the following: head, chest, hands, legs, feet - totalling at 75 items. Again, these will all need animating and all icons designed for them.
Misc items: Things like potions, coins, some random items for quests, 25 should be fine. These won't need animating, but will still need all their corresponding icons.
Item summery: 150 items in total. As said before, variation is the key here. While there may only be 15 sets of gloves, we need them all to look different enough to give the illusion that there is a lot more than this.

Characters
Simple character design including the following;
- 4 different skin tones

- 5 different faces
- 5 different hair styles, each style with 4 different colours
- 4 different colours for the starting top
- 4 different colours for the starting bottoms
- 4 different colours for the starting shoes.

Character animation will also be kept relatively simple. 3-5 animations for casting, 1 for being hit, 3 for attacking with each type of weapon (a staff will be quite different to a short sword), a jump / fall, walking, and maybe a level up thrown in there.
Character summery: The animation could be quite a large job, 4-5 different weapon types straight away gives at least 15 or so animations that need doing.

Enemies
We're looking for somewhere between 25 and 35 unique enemies, depending on how the rest of the budget goes. Ideally these would be in sets of 2 or 3, with each set looking similar (allowing mob bosses / special enemies). Again, variation is the key here, we want each of those enemies to look completely different, changing the colour won’t pass as a new enemy
All of these will need 1-3 attacking animations, one for being hit and one for dyeing.
Enemy summery: Fairly straight forward

Special effects
Not too much needed here, 15 attacking spells, 2-3 summoning spells, 10 buffing spells (effects around / on the player, rather than attacking enemies) and a level up effect should be fine. Roughly 30 effects in total.

Final Information
I can't stress enough here, all of these graphics are for a side scrolling game, not for the typical 2.5D isometric view found on this forum
Also, we are spending a great deal of money on this, and as such expect high quality work in return. The turnaround for all of this would be roughly 3 - 4 months from today (our coding team are starting tomorrow, April 3rd)

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Ok, so that's all that information done
In relation to graphics, I’m currently looking for how much people think that will actually cost (per map, item, character etc), I have actually got a full company hired for everything, and they are interested in how much I will pay for the graphics. Pretty much I need a rough idea of that asap
Also, if it turns out they want far too much for the GFX, this project will be open to the public.

Thanks,
Lewis.

ummm wow this all just seems a bot to serious to me, but just to get things clear your after graphics based around maplestory 2d side scroller engine or ninjastory.

to != too && your != you're

on-topic, I assume he's after original graphics, not something "based around" the visual style of another game.

if it was your question if the point of view was like maplestory and ninja story:
yes

But the graphics could easily be done in a more serious style: