[2D artist] for collaboration on 95% complete game - Dungeon Bash Thread

This would be for revenue share and/or Kickstart.

The game is Dungeon Bash, a mobile game for Android and IOS. There is no technical impediment or work required to release also for PC and Browser, but that decision has not yet been made.

The game itself is 95% complete with placeholder graphics done by me, a friend, and borrowed from Scribblenauts (just so we have *something* during development). This is not vapour-ware, the game is basically done and you can download and play it now for IOS or Android.

Please go to www.dungeonbash.com and follow the directions to join the closed test-group and get the game for your device and start playing.

Its a squad-based tactical game where you control a team of three creatures randomly selected from around 30. There are 80+ creatures in total.

Dungeon Bash is a decent game, but it requires gorgeous, professional graphics and artistic direction to be taken seriously, even to a Kickstarter audience.

Although the game shows static images for creatures moving and attacking, the code is already in place to show animated moves and attacks, and in fact 4 creatures do that already in the game (troll, elf, demon and wolf: choose the troll in your starting party to see him animate). All that is required is for art to be dropped in, and the static creatures will animate. Similarly for all types of effects, levels, fonts, UI elements and so on - once the art is dropped in, it will just work.

My thoughts are that I am looking for something similar in style to the Kingdom Rush series - cartoony animations that will look good on small screen devices. I am open as to the artistic direction, particularly for the UI design which is, let us just say "functional" but ugly and amateur-looking right now.

The programming work remaining is polish and bug fixing. For instance when tiles contain 'holes' which is terrain that non-flying creatures cant pass, currently the game just shows an individual hole in each tile, even when the tiles are contiguous. I need to implement a system to show one bigger hole across multiple contiguous tiles. thats an example of a bit of polish work outstanding. Other polish would be smoothing out the tutorial, animating buttons, adding random 'decoration' to tiles for visual variation, modifying the UI elements under the direction of someone with graphical design skills.

This game will be released to a 4-6 month target date. There is no technical risk associated with that happening. If you collaborate on this project you will have a professionally designed and implemented game in the app stores within that time frame. The only question is what level of graphical quality it will be released with, and that will be a large factor in determining how successful it is.

Looks like this will be a great project! Will the artist be required to generate sprite sheets, or are you expecting the animation to happen in a different manner? Is this a custom engine?

Edited by: Dracowyr

Hi, the game needs individual images that make up the animations, with a numerical postfix to denote frames.

eg zombie_attack_front_01 ... zombie attack_front_06 would be the 6 images that make up an animation of a zombie attacking in that direction. The images just need to be dropped into the appropriate directory and the development version of the game will pick them up and generate a sprite sheet from the resources every time it is run.

So if you wanted to use a "bones" system to animate, for instance (which is very scriblenauts like) that would be fine, as long as the individual images are output and provided with the appropriate naming convention.

Given 80-90 characters and two types of animation per character (move and attack), each of those in 4 directions - front, back, left and right, where left and right could easily be mirrored, so lets say 6 animations per character.

Plus assorted other animations for effects and images for tiles and game UI.

I like the scribblenauts style - its quite economical and yet expressive in its "chibi" style.

I have the scribblenauts images already in the required directories and each 'animation' is simply a single frame, so everything looks static. The animation engine simply plays as many images as there are over the specified period, like 1 sec for an attack, so each animation does not have to have the same number of frames. whatever works.

Thanks for such a thorough answer - that clarifies my question!

Hi, this position is filled now, cheers