[Filled] Programmer in search of an Artist for a Tower Defence game

Thanks everyone for your interest, the position has been filled.

Hello,

I’m an indie programmer and I am looking to collaborate with an artist for an isometric tower defence game. Your primary responsibility will be the game’s graphics – art assets. But at the same time, I want you to have enough creative freedom to adapt the style, theme, and level design to what you feel the game would benefit from the most. So you will also share the designer role if you want.

The Game

Not a lot is set in stone (no GDD or such), but I do have the base concept and gameplay decided upon to keep the goal clear:

The genre is tower defence, where baddies march a certain path to the player’s base in waves, and the player builds and maintains towers to kill them off. The game should be set in fantasy/medieval setting or similar, and not modern/future. There should also be lightness of tone, not too grim or dark.
Basic buildable towers come in four base element flavours (earth, air, fire, water). Each tower can be further combined with other elements to upgrade it to a different purpose tower. Such as air+fire=ash, earth+fire+air=volcano, fire+fire=inferno, etc. Different types complement each other and can be efficient/inefficient against certain mobs, such as applying debuffs. Element combination is the main selling point.
There are also the player’s keep/base and resource buildings that are needed to gather resources for tower building and upgrading and cost gold, which is dropped by killed mobs.
The game progresses in day/night cycles. At night baddies attack and during the day the player can build up the settlement in peace. Towers take time to build/upgrade, so it is important to plan building for daytime.
Different levels have different “opponents”, who send different types of baddies, so the player needs to choose the right towers/combos for a level.

About half the programming is done.

Here is the screenshot of the game with random terrain, and some mock-up sprites (click to enlarge):

Needed artwork

The game is in isometric projection with 52x26px square tiles, 2D sprites (no 3D involved, but pre-rendering 3D is fine). Towers are about 3x3 tiles wide, so about 78x182px per sprite. Keep/resource buildings are larger. Mobs are 1x1 tile wide, so about 50x90px for small ones and some 80x140px for larger ones per sprite. None of the sizes (expect the 52x26 tile size) are set in stone, and I can relatively easily modify them.

The art the game needs is as follows:

Mob sprites, at least 4 facing directions, at least several unique variations, movement/death animation frames
Tower sprites – 4 base, 10 combinations, potentially more if you have the motivation
Town buildings – 2 or so resource buildings, keep/base, spawner, building/construction site
Other game world objects/props (trees, rocks, whatever works/looks best for level/setting)
Various icons – element icons, action icons (build, upgrade, destroy, etc.), feedback icons (day/night cycle clock, wave icons, etc.)
Depending on how much sprites you can provide, I can add more buildings and strategy or just cool effects. I can do lots with sprites, and a bit with shaders.

I am not terrible with graphics, and I can do some things well enough. So these elements are needed, but because the above art is the priority, I could do these myself:

Tiles, transitions, paths, terrain – I'm moderately happy with how it currently is
UI (menus, buttons, labels, panels, etc.)
One or more splash screens (e.g. level lost, level won) – not essential and can replace with text
Projectiles, their fly/hit animations, debuff effects
Miscellaneous scene animations, like smoke, fire, etc.

You can see some of my “artwork” in the development diary of my blog, so you ought to at least surpass that.

The rest

My starting budget is $500 (≈£320/≈€370) and/or profit % if you like to gamble. I am paying from my pocket, so I cannot offer a high compensation. I want to do a collaboration and not just “buy graphics”, so I rather you are in this for the project and not just the Hand Money Left

. If this gets some nice art and screenshots going, I can try my luck at 8bitfunding or similar for more art budget.

The game is being written in C# w/ XNA. This makes it Windows-only for PCs, but is potentially portable to Xbox for XBLIG. I’m planning on initially putting it for purchase via BMT Micro or some other retailer in a couple to few months (I hope). I’ll register and make a simple website when I get a good title.

The project is not very original, but it introduces (technically “borrows” since nothing is ever new anyway) a few unique elements. I chose a simple idea, so that the implementation is simple and straight-forward. But the concept can also be built upon easily. I want a game published soon, so I can say I have gone through all the steps of online-publishing a commercial game.

I have a blog at http://blog.capdb.net/, and you can see the engine development in the semi-relevant diary I keep. I prefer to keep in touch, so I am in GMT+2 for those purposes. It’s not really essential that you are in Europe’s time zones, but that might work out best for IM communication. PM me, e-mail me at RudyTheDev at gmail, or IM Skype on RudyTheDev.

Thanks for reading,
Rudy.