Team name:
None

Project name:
Multiple

Brief description:
My goal is to develop a series of short games (about 3 months development per game) and sell them for a few dollars. I am planning to focus on RPGs and Adventure games which the player will complete in a few days rather than the typical 50 hours of gameplay. The focus will be on replay value due to high customization of character growth. I am open to other genres as well. I really want to stress the short development cycle, we are going to be cranking out games. Even if the game is not complete we are going to release it anyways to meet the schedule. If one game really takes off we can consider putting together a full team and turn it into a traditional length game.

Target aim:
XBox live community arcade, Windows phone, Windows, In-Browser

Compensation:
50% profits

Technology:
XNA, HTML5

Talent needed:
I need a talented artist who can do 2d pixel art, possibly simple 3d and simple high res as well.

Team structure:
It will be a 2 man team, myself as developer and musician and you as artist. Both of us will design.

Website:
Private

Contacts:
surixurient@gmail.com

Previous Work by Team:
I have several engines I developed in XNA to work with.
1. 3D action/adventure engine: http://www.youtube.c...h?v=tR7n0X8e6F0
2. A traditional 2D tilebased RPG engine with turn-based battle : will post video
3. A traditional side view shooter engine with modes for flight or gravity ground-based movement with jumping. gravity projectiles, multiple levels of scrolling background/foreground, this engine can integrate with the 2d rpg engine for an adventurestage/actionstage gameflow. : will post video
4. A traditional 2D RPG engine with scrolling giant bitmap backgrounds rather than tilebased, supports multiple layers (walking behind, infront of,below or above things), supports shrinking sprites as they walk into an area specified as being in the distance :

5. A 2d adventure RPG tile based engine with 3 (virtual)dimensions for jumping and movable platforms etc. : video 1 http://www.youtube.c...h?v=5lzmay8j2PQ video 2 http://www.youtube.c...h?v=QtaRXDC-C4M

And editors for the engines: map editor, ai editor, event editor, item editor, sprite animation editor, etc.

Additional Info:


Feedback:
ANY

Still seeking an artist.

I added a new video of a map engine.

Well the 3 month dev time is very important in that I have learned that a dev time longer than that is when the feelings of "gee I'm getting bored of this project and it will take forever, but I have all these new ideas that I want to try instead, lets make a new and better game now" start creeping in. Also the one-month-in productivity drop can be avoided if you know there is only 1 month left of heavy work then a final 1 month of polishing. 3 months is swallowable, it is possible to stay excited for 3 months.

A few things I have planned to make a game doable in 3 months:
Low res: Art scans can be downscaled and recolored to 256 colors per bitmap to make it mesh with low res sprites as well as give it a retro mid 90s feel. So the source will not need to be terribly detailed. (gives the possibility of later releasing a HD version as well)

Limited number of 'sets': Some great stories can be told with just a few sets, look at theatrical plays. Revisiting a town later in the game after it was overrun, burned, at nighttime, can seem fresh and new but require minimal new art. Have a key game map which the most detail was put into where much action of the game happens, like the example you gave Mariachi.

Contract work where needed: I have budgeted some of my own money for investment in the projects. For example I know a deviantart artist who does sprite sheets for about 40 dollars each. I can't however afford to fund all of the art this way, the majority would need to be done by a partner working for profit share. The partner would have to agree on this kind of contract spending of course being it would be reimbursed by game profits after release, pre 50/50 split, and pre-tax too


The detailed designs you mention Mariachi I could provide but my idea was for a partnership, where both members would be designing. I figured that would be more attractive to an artist then just following detailed orders so to speak. One member would have to take general ownership of design/style but that role would reverse from game to game. Also I can do some art myself, like touching up on the per-pixel level, painting completed lineart (if shadow areas and contours are specified), crappy-looking concept art.

One thing I really don't want to do is the doodle or abstract/minimalist style of gameart. I just can not get excited about those kind of games.

Thanks for the feedback. And for the wish of luck. I'll need it!

This is my reasoning for the palette reduction:
I look at games like Alundra and Secret of Mana and Rhapsody, then I compare those games to later 2d titles and I feel the old ones are possibly more ascetically pleasing (unless the new ones have insane detail). I have narrowed down the reason to be the limited palette and low resolution. The limited resolution makes a lack of detail feel far more detailed that it is. And a big mistake of some ametuer low res artists seems to be creating sprites and environments with 16 million colors, if I convert those to 16 colors for sprites and 256 for environments and tweak the palette they look far better, the brain of the viewer fills in the detail and missing color grades. The brain makes the shading perfect, because it knows how shading is suppose to look based on the cues from the few tones visible.

I know it is putsy to tweak paletes after it was butchered by a computerized auto color reduction, but I feel it is far less time consuming than the extra time needed to create the level of detail necessary to have a high color piece of art look professional. I could be way off being I am not a real artist, but I draw some myself and if I stick to like 8-12 colors when drawing a face I can pass as halfway decent, add in all the extra shades and gradients and that's all the more mistakes in shading and non-clean linestrokes that are all of a sudden obvious.

Of course, once I find an artist they can convince me to throw all that reasoning out the window.

Only 3 months on that type of graphics is a lot of hours.

I would imagine that if you push the artist to hard, he/she would probably quit after a short time. Most people who can work on royalty based projects usually have an job or school, so how may hours do you expect that person to put into the project? Is so easy to lose motivation when you're burned out. Have you considered using 2D rendered toon-shaded graphics (easier to reuse animations and modify characters)? That could be more realistic considering the timeframe.

That is a possibility Dhandon, I have considered cell shading. I am open to 3d artists as well. But someone who can do both would be even better, because I also want to port some of the games for phone and html5 (in browser) and 3d gets more demanding hardware-wise on those platforms.