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[jrjellybeans]

Hello everybody!

Jr. Jellybeans is FINALLY settled into our next game, and we decided that we wanted to find an artist EARLY.
We've been posting on all of the art / game forums, so I thought I would post one here as well.

It'd be really great to find an artist from TIG because THIS community gave us such great feedback last time.  So, the sooner that we find an artist, the sooner we can get a demo ready, so we won't run into the problems we had last time!

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A bit about the project:

"The Old Fairy Wars" is a 2D game about fairies where the player will kill enemies, level up, and go on a fantastic journey.

Our goal is that it plays like a quicker version of Castlevania!

The game is early in the process, so there is plenty of room to be experimental. Generally speaking, however, we're envisioning a "Heart of Darkness" type of art style!

We would like to finish the game within the next 4 months.

We currently have a 8 level demo that should give you a great idea of where the game is heading!

We would like some feedback from other people about the game, but will NOT release a demo UNTIL some art has been put into place. As such, we NEED YOU!

This is an UNPAID position, where we WILL agree to PAY you once we make a profit. In fact, IF you complete all the art work and stay on the project for the ENTIRE time, I'd hope to pay you SOMETHING.  (For our last game we did PAY ALL of our artists what was agreed, but ended it up costing us too much money AND took too long, so we've decided to be more careful this time). We have a contract that you will need to agree to!

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As for us:
Jr. Jellybeans has been officially around for about 9 months. We finished our first project "The Cherokee Indian" in July. You can find our website here:

http://jrjellybeansgames.com

You can check out the video of The Cherokee Indian here:





PLEASE send your portfolio, any additional info, and any QUESTIONS to:
jrjellybean [AT] live [DOT] com

[jrjellybeans]

We're still trying to find a sprite artist everyone.  If you think you'd be interested in our project, please send us an e-mail.

In addition, if anyone has any suggestions on how to go about improving the number of people who are interested, please let us know.  Aside from actually putting up a demo of the game, we can't really think what we could do to generate more interest from artists, and we'd like to hear what other ideas people have. 

This is the third time that we've struggled to find an artist and we feel like we're just hitting a brick wall.  We'd hope that once WE figure out how to find quality artists, we can help other people who would potentially have the same problem.

So, if you're a sprite artist looking for a project to join or if you have any suggestions in this area, please let us know!

[Montoli]

A quick look at your web site seems to indicate that you sell games for money.

You say that this is an UNPAID position, but that you'll maybe hopefully pay them if the game makes money.

What does this even mean?  If I were an artist, this would have me very leery.  What are the other costs to the game?  Art is clearly a cost, but you're saying "we can't promise any payment for it."  Where is the money going before art?  How MUCH money has to go to that/those places before the game "has made a profit" and the artist can see some return?

For me at least, what I can gather of your payment model reminds me all too much of record labels agreeing to only pay musicians on "profits".  It SOUNDS like "after I earn enough to recoup the time *I* invested, I'll start paying back the time YOU invest, if you decide to be my artist."

So, some suggestions for attracting more artists:

• Stop calling it UNPAID in the description, especially if you actually are planning on trying to pay them.
• Have a more clear plan for how you are going to pay them.  Make sure they know what the plan is.
• If you're worried about breaking even, consider going to a percentage-based payment model.  i. e. the artist just gets a flat-out 20% (or whatever) of the money you get.  People are in general more willing to be part of a deal where both people don't get as much as they hoped, than they are for deals where one side might get everything and the other side get zero...

Best of luck!

[jrjellybeans]

Hey Montoli,

Yeah that was actually the way the system was working at first.  We decided to change that, however.  Now, however, we are still calling it an UNPAID position.

What we mean by UNPAID is that we won't pay anyone until the project is ENTIRELY complete. It would require a large commitment on someone's time for a variety of reasons: 1.  the game is still being made; 2.  there is A LOT of art to be completed.  Unlike last time, we didn't want to pay anyone while the work is getting completed (we're not going to do a milestone payment system this time).

Currently, what we are offering people is $2000 US dollars or 20 % of the profit of the PC sales of the game (whichever is greater).  This only applies if a person completes ALL the work.  If a person leaves early, they won't get anything.

A problem that we ran into last time as well, was hearing from our artists - "You're not paying us enough to do this work."  Even though the terms of what we were offering were pretty clear from the start, 2 of our [best] artists still made that comment.  We are trying to avoid that completely.

Relatively speaking, the only other cost is music which would be handled by us and be relatively cheap (less than 200 dollars).

So, it puts us into a strange position:
1.  We have a bit of money to pay people.
2.  We're willing to share our profits with people so that we can BOTH win.
3.  Learning our lesson with The Cherokee Indian, we can't guarantee that a person will make more than $2000. 
4.  $2000 is probably not enough money to cover the cost of just paying someone for all the work, so we don't want to hear anyone complain about it.
5.  Really, we're looking more for a collaboration with an artist who's willing to work, grow, and learn with us.  With that said, it doesn't make any sense for us to work with a complete beginner.

It's like: "We can pay you if you can do the work, but you could probably make more somewhere else.  If you couldn't, we'd like to work with you but you have to know SOMEWHAT what you're doing because it just doesn't make any sense to have completely bad art in a game."

Thanks for explaining that, Montoli, and I've posted a help wanted on the deviantArt forums that seems more in line with what you are talking about:

http://forum.deviantart.com/community/projects/1360893/

Would you have any suggestions regarding that exact posting that we could do to improve the posting?

Thanks a bunch!

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I hadn't updated this posting at all because we have never gotten any responses from this site so I thought it would just be buried.

[Epitaph64]

I doubt that sprite artists would dare commit any assets before at least getting a contract of payment or something. Then again, someone may.

[Brice]

I agree with the comments.  While I'm not artist, I am a game developer, and I don't think anyone would take this offer.

Image if you were applying to a part time job at McDonald's, and they said, "We don't pay you for the first three months.   You'll still work 15 hours a week, but until McDonald's makes a profit, we don't give you anything.  Once we're rolling in dough though, then we pay you."

Would do it?  No!  Of course not!  You want to get paid for work you're doing, regardless of how the game does.

Sorry, but if you want an artist, and unless you know them personally or can work out some other mutual benefit, you're going to have to pay them.  That's not just for indie development, that's also for the major game industry and most jobs in general.  Big game companies still pay their developers as they're working on games.  And even if they leave the project early, they still worked for it, so of course they still got paid for when they were there.

If you're trying to encourage people to stay on for the duration of the project, you'll need good leadership and commitment.

Best of luck.