Short answer: Probably.

Here’s why: Lets say you’re pretty good at actionscript (2 or 3) what do you find yourself spending the most time on when making a game? Since you’re pretty good at the actionscript side of things, the art is what probably takes the longest, or if not the longest, at least an equal amount of time as the programming side does. Lest say you didn’t have to make any of the art, you would potentially cut down the time it takes to make a game by 50% or even more.

How do you find an artist? Actually, finding an artist is usually pretty easy. There are two ways. The first way is using FGL, If you’re not a member of FGL I strongly suggest you join, it’s free. On FGL there is a forum dedicated solely to helping programmers find artists (or artists find programmers). Once you make a new thread saying something like “I need an artist!” you’ll usually get multiple responses within a day. The second way is finding someone you actually know (which I’ve found to produce more reliable results, nothing beats being able to actually talk to the artist, face to face).  A friend of mine, who is a professional artist was more than happy to do art for my games.

Now you have to decide how much you’ll pay them and how. Usually artists will accept two ways of figuring out how much you’ll pay them. One way is a set amount, say $150. This way is good if you’re sure, and I mean absolutely sure your game will do quite well. It’d suck to have to pay the artist $150 and then only get $50 yourself because the game was only sponsored for $200. On the other hand, it would be sweet if it got sponsored for $1000 so you got 85% of the profit. Here’s the second way. You can offer a split of whatever the game gets sponsored for, a common split is 60/40 where you get 60 and they get 40 (paid after the game gets sponsored). This way is excellent if you really don’t know how well your game will do because even if your game doesn’t get sponsored at all, you loose nothing except time spent.

For my first game, AVZ:Alien VS Zombie, I did a 60/40 split with my artist. On the game that I’m currently working on (which will be on FGL by the end of August!) I’m paying my artists (yes, plural, I’ve hired two for this game) a set amount. In total, I’m paying $200 for my artists and my sounds (I got my sounds from Sound Rangers, they offer fantastic quality music and sound effects).