Dear reader,

for an upcomming ARPG hobby project I'm looking for a 2D/Concept Artist to design the game's characters, races, monsters and places. Are you in search of a challenge and want to work on a game with a unique story told in it's own universe developed with state-of-the-art technology? Then this might be your chance!

I'm a long time gamer, designer, developer, board game fan and hobbyist board game author, passionated in games since age of 6 with addiction to video games. Working as senior in the games industrie at day, at night tinkering at my very own game engine and ideas for games I want to make with it popping into my mind from time to time. While most of them stay at the idea level, a few have become real game projects at least in planning and I created w complex universe arround all those games during past 20 years.

The Game

The game this post is about is a hack-and-slay action role-playing game in a steam punkt and fantasy mixed setting of a world far in it's own history. A world once home for a high spiritually race called the ancestors, now a place of political riots, misery and cult of gods and other things that let the player explore the abyss of humanity facing a big evil that throws it's shadows over the imperial capital. The player will explore dark and scary places of long forgotten cultures with one of 6 playable races in cooperative multiplayer.

Your Tasks

• Design the races and characters belonging to the story
• Design the enemies the player will fight against up to the boss monsters
• Design the places based on the story
• Design other elements of the game (like HUD look and feel)

Requirements

• At least some experience in 2D art and design
• Good communication skills and a reliable response time
• Disciplined self-reliant and motivated work style
• Fluent in spoken and written English
• A Discord account
• At least 5 hours per Week to work on this project

Considered a Plus

• Knowledge of the German language
• As passionated as I am for letting others be part of interesting worlds
• Working as professional in the industry too

I offer

No money at the moment because I'm working in my spare time and at my own charge, but a friendly, motivated and passioned teammate in a highly professional work environment, technical knowledge from a long-term industrie professional and and a share once the game is in a polished state.

Dear reader, thank you for taken the time to read the full post and if you have any questions or want to work with me/us, please feel free to send a PM or Discord Message with a short introduction and a brief time schedule so I/we have an overview to plan further development.

Thank you in advance!

P.S.
See also https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/701862-writer-for-hackn-slay-arpg/

How many enemies and places do you anticipate to have in your game?

When you say "concept artist", do you mean just concept art and no finished game art for this request? Will finished game art be a separate task possibly done by someone else?

Also, what do you mean by "state-of-the-art technology"?

Lastly, what platform is this game being developed for?

9 hours ago, Guy Fleegman said:

How many enemies and places do you anticipate to have in your game?

Without telling too much from the story, the game will take place just in one location that is the imperial capital and just in the undercity district and below. So the player (group) will use the undercity district as their base and walk their way down the sewer below it, old ancient ruins when going deeper, some caves and tunnels and some secret places to reveal.

There are 6 different races playable, mostly in male/female version. Some story related characters like the Sewer Trader and random NPCs.

We have a couple of enemies along with the imperial guarding there will be some monsters and mutants crawling through the sewer, some spiders but also the "empty ones" in different forms. Hard to say yet how many we will need in the end.

9 hours ago, Guy Fleegman said:

When you say "concept artist", do you mean just concept art and no finished game art for this request? Will finished game art be a separate task possibly done by someone else?

With concept art, I just mean concept art on the first level. There will be more artworks needed for sure in the future like inventory items, skill icons or character sketches in the character sheet but as I think this will take a while to develop, this isn't a task for just right now.

9 hours ago, Guy Fleegman said:

Also, what do you mean by "state-of-the-art technology"?

Different aspects of game development: from a modern compiler creating fast reliable assembly, the tooling and asset pipelines up to perormance driven and parallelized code to modern rendering techniques using the latest available APIs and resources published from AAA developers based on their current projects, learnings and solutions.

9 hours ago, Guy Fleegman said:

Lastly, what platform is this game being developed for?

The game will be published for PC; Windows and maybe Linux but no Mac or mobile versions.

I hopefully answered your questions satisfyingly

Thanks, Shaarigan. That answers my questions perfectly and it'll help others considering this proposal as well.

As someone asked for, the graphics style we are looking for is something dark and more realistic to fit into the dark and depressive story kind of the game. Like this examples:

Cartoon or comic style graphics won't fit into the games setting very well

*Bump

Hello,

you have had questions so I try to answer them anyways but please don't waste this topic with an ongoing discussion. If there is anything you want to ask just do this via PM or Discord ?

1 hour ago, GoliathForge said:

I'd be interested in not past art styles used but more of a relevant demo where I can gauge coding ability.

What coding ability do you consider to see and why? I frequently write in this forum to answer topics from my experience and personal opinion, isn't this enougth? Anyways, don't worry, we will place our game engine SDK at GitHub along with the new website.

1 hour ago, GoliathForge said:

Maybe if the idea was developed a little more, this might not have sat idle for the majority of the month. I'll admit, I only glanced at your idea. (Be one of six shoved in dark scary places at the capital)  For my own play project, I've been considering steam or diesel punk and from there explored shifts such as ion punk or went as far in my head to say atomic punk where I started thinking a world as you got smaller instead of going universal. Ideas are great huh. Did you have any luck with the writer search or were the crows pecking at that as well?

I had a message of someone that is currently ordering and shifting through the stack of different aspects of information, not only belonging to this project but to get an enceclopedia for the current and upcoming projects so we have anything on one place. While he is doing this, I currently work on the engine/ framework  and write the final GDD so work is ongoing however. I'm not the person that is posting for any half-thought ideas rather than real gaming concepts.

A problem might be that my focus always is at "making an adventure that is fun to play" instead of selling a product, this might be complicated and against the commercial thoughts other people have. I'm also rerally the "idea" guy along with over 10 years of experience in developing, at a hobby but also a professional level in the industry. I had the luck to participate in several kinds of aspects in game programming, from tooling and engine development, porting games to different platforms (Mobile, Playstation) to full gameplay/ game AI programming and also being a lead on a game project released on steam that I also fully designed in the first place, driving another hobby; my board game design also.

1 hour ago, GoliathForge said:

Anyway, your style speaks to me and I'm curious about this 'game engine' you tinker with at night. But now I read you're only looking for industry professionals. hmm...I see

I don't know where you read that but I wrote "At least some experience in 2D art and design" in the requirements and only marked professional as nice to have so feel free to talk with me on Discord if you like and I'll also answer any further questions you have. But I feeld as if I had to point this out because I had in any hobby projects people that applied for whatever I whished to do but revealed a level of inexperience that those projects got stuck sooner or later. Someone told me that he wrote a game engine that turned out to be SDL 2 just with a little Assimp on top. In the end, that one even didn't got into our tooling nor even has had any knowledge of make/ nmake and whatever is our there so I don't expect much but I expect at least to get the job done for whatever a contributor is interested in.

The game engine, I started during my study in 2011 has grown to the already mentioned game engine SDK we will publish at GitHub in the near future. I'm currently iterating the code design and preparing for another managed package model. I like modularity and our current design now supports that level of code freedom I desired. But there won't be much to see because it isn't focused on shiny fancy editor windows but down to the hard API level and raw coding model that will grant access to the performance needed for making games that don't look good as their only feature but also play well and have a nice "feeling" on the meta layer.

This is a lot of work and I enjoy every line of code very much but it takes much time as solo-dev so currently we are 2 developers (a coulege of mine) going streight to the finishing line of the first iteration and hopefully get some more contributor in this direction too.

Long story short, we are on the go ?

However, this game is considered to be a relaxed project so we expect getting some people matching will take some time and we are still in need for the 2D artist and further on I will also post some other contribution requests in the hobby forum. But doing one for another first

The position is still open

Do you need game mechanics designer/programmer? World builder?