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[kovarex]

Hello,

I'm 27 years old programmer, 20 days ago i decided to quit my corporate job and use all my saving to try something crazy, to make computer game

I'm working on the game 12 hours a day and I manged to find one more programmer to help me with the game writing, and I have several friends with programing skills, but I don't know anyone who can do computer graphics.

The game is 2d isometric and we basically need everything, basic things that pop up in my head:
A) character 8 way animations of walking/mining/shooting/dying, maybe some more stuff
B) Vehicle 64 way animations (to be able to rotate smoothly)
C) Terrain tiles (several variations for every tile, some can be animated)
D) Trees, explosions, fires, smokes, resources
E) Machines (mostly we need to have more sprite parts/animations that are used by the eninge, for example robotic arm platform + robotic arm rotator + robotic arm hand)
F) Enemies (8 way animations of walking/shooting/dying, maybe better 16 way), count of enemies we will want is not certain, but all I can say is "several"
G) Other stuff like, power lines, roads, rails, walls, robotic towers
H) Item icons
I) Gui (optional) (Button images, several machine specific gui images
J) Concept art (optional) for things like loading screen/main menu etc.

Some of it is going to be pixel art, but I guess that big part of the work (mostly things that need rotations) could be done by just rendering some 3d model/model animations in all desired directions automatically, and I don't really need to be all of the work original, if you find some nice free models you can ofcourse use it.

Pixel artist, 3d model scripter/modeler, concept artist can be different persons as long as we are able to make the whole game concept coherent.

Edit: I already registered appropriate web sites, but didn't have time to put anything there, if you can open facebook, there is some more info about the project here http://www.facebook.com/groups/368015139906998/

[Schwiggy]

I'm not an amazing artist so I fear that I wouldn't be much help to this project in that way. But something did come to mind when I read your list of needs.

64 way animations of vehicles is insane with the exception of pre-rendered 3D (which would still be a massive waste of VRAM). A while ago though I was experimenting with a "papery" method of showing isometric direction.

Here's what I mean: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9633551/inklake_paperbike.zip

Ignore the character talking to himself and press space next to the dirt-bike to ride it. You'll see that it skews in a way that appears to make it 3d but still flat. I was thinking that you could blend 4 or 8 directions like that instead of just 2 for a practically seamless (the "seams" would be slightly blurry I think because you'd be fading in and out two different directions) rotation. The weapons in that little prototype also work like the bike.

Sorry to be slightly off topic but it's something your potential artist will want addressed before reaching an agreement.

Cheers to many more days of being an indie game dev trying something crazy,
Zach

[kovarex]

Well, I was experimenting with things like that (with 16 direction car sprite and rotations and some other transforations), but it was always looking very weird (mainly transitions between each direction).

I'm aware that 64 bit directions will take a lot of vram, but as it will be the most consuming thing in the game and it is critical for convenient gameplay, I guess it is handlable.

130*130 pixel car in 64 bit directions is 4Mb of vram per animation frame, so without animation (some partial things could be done by tricks) it is ok, as there are just few vehicles (and airplanes), I want to be able to put everything on 8192*8192 atlas bitmap internally anyway (drawing optimisation), that gives me 64 Mb of Vram, and it seems to be enough.

[Schwiggy]

Ah, okay. I was imagining it fully animated in every direction.

[kovarex]

I was thinking it through and I would actually benefit from some animation (or other kind of) frames.

If I used 10 animation frames for each direction and 10 different vehicles it would use 10*10*4Mb Vram (400Mb Vram), and it is probably still ok on most cards, and I could always dynamically (or by options) decrease the rotation count/frame count used on computer with less vram.

[GavinHarrisonSounds]

Hey, just sent you an email!

[NostalgicAlgorithms]

I sent you an email also. Any news on this project?