So what's up?Hey there. My name's Ed and I'm looking for art help for a project of mine. My day job is leading mobile development for a medical startup, but I've got an overriding passion for games--and building good ones. I've been working for a while on the preliminaries for a game I'm certain will be fantastic, and I need some help to take it from planning to done.
What's the project?For the last six months or so I've been doing preliminary work on a 2D JRPG going by the name of
Anaeax. My intention is deliver a modern, character-focused title, in the vein of the
Suikoden series or the Genesis iterations of
Phantasy Star; I'd like to make it feel like a modern title as opposed to just trying to recapture the past. I don't want to clone
Chrono Trigger or
Final Fantasy or copy some other twenty-year-old game. In the last few years we've seen a bunch of indie RPGs show up on Kickstarter and elsewhere that all but cop to trying to capture the magic of the first time you plugged
Final Fantasy III into a Super NES (or, for me, the first time
Phantasy Star IV landed on Sega Channel). More power to them, but I'm not the same guy I was when I first played those games and I don't want to remake them. I find more inspiring the prospect of making something better.
What do you bring to the table?It's my project, so I wear a lot of hats. Code (game and tools), mechanics, writing, level design, production and marketing whenever that needs to happen--if I can do it, it's on my plate. Probably most importantly, I'm a very competent programmer. I've been doing this since I was seven or eight years old and I live and breathe this stuff. It's What I Do. I've got experience developing for a wide array of platforms and the plan is to release
Anaeax for five platforms (Windows, OS X, Linux, iOS, and Android). I'll be handling the bulk of that myself.
I'm also self-funding the project. I've had this in my head since before the rise of Kickstarter for game funding, and it hasn't really changed my plan--I'd rather concentrate on building something fantastic than on putting on a dog-and-pony show for Kickstarter backers.
So this is paid?Totally. This is self-funded, but there is a budget for this game and my cash flow is pretty solid. I'm a professional and I wouldn't expect somebody else to work for free or for promises; it'd be nice (from my perspective as the guy writing the checks) to convert the working relationship into a going concern with some revenue sharing if we end up clicking but that's further down the line and not a decision to be made lightly.
What help do you need?Anaeax calls first and foremost for character and environmental pixel art. I'm not planning for this to be a short game, so I'm going into this with the expectation that there's a lot of it. I'm consciously trying to avoid the 'retro' aesthetic with this game, with a target resolution of 1080p (pursuant to platform needs) and with a full 32-bit color palette. I have a thing for smooth animation and a texture budget that can allow for a lot of it, and the game engine is capable of supporting both tile maps and bitmap-based walkable ones (layered and stacked in the same "level"). There's a lot of freedom in the specs and the engine to do some pretty awesome stuff.
While I realize it's a tall order, what I'm continually seeking is a creative collaborator who has a compatible mindset and can share a vision for a project. I'm a visual guy with a lot of subject-matter knowledge regarding visual art and I have a pretty strong vision of what I'd like to see out of this game, but I want to work with someone who brings their own to the table. I'm capable of producing a ton of the moral equivalent of set direction for somebody whose preference is micromanagement, but that's not my style--I'd rather work with someone who can get the drift of it, volley back with a "hey, what do you think of...?", and make it better than if they just took a brain dump from me.
One other thing--I know I write above as if I'm looking for one artist for both character work and environment work. I'd prefer it if I could find one awesome artist who could do both, but that's not an absolute requirement. If you tick one checkbox or the other and are still interested, do feel free to drop me a line.
Contact informationYou can reach me via email at
ed@swankyrobot.com. I keep pretty odd hours and am terrible about checking my email in general, but I'll get back to you as soon as I can.