Dev team recruiting animators for Sonic fangame

I’m part of a dev team building a Sonic fangame focused on the Chao Gardens from Sonic Adventure 1 and 2. We’re recreating, expanding, and improving upon the original Chao system as much as we possibly can. We need animators to help us create animations for the playable and NPC characters, as well as the Chao themselves. All models that animators will be working with are already fully rigged and ready to go. I quite enjoy animating myself, but I’ve been helping so much with the coding lately that I simply don’t have the time.

What is this game?
The game, called The Chao Project, is a fanmade project endeavoring to revive the Chao Garden feature from the Sonic Adventure series, as it’s a feature many fans miss that SEGA has never brought back. Our goal is not only to bring back this wonderful feature, but to expand upon it in a way Sonic Adventure could not. The feature was very popular but limited by the developer’s desire to avoid taking away attention from the main game. Since we’re bringing back this feature as a standalone game, we can improve and expand upon it without that restriction, and bring the game to it’s full potential.

Hold on, what is a Chao Garden?
The Chao Garden is a feature from Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2, as well as it’s remakes. It is a virtual pet raising simulator that allows people to raise a small, innocent, childlike life form known as a Chao, hatching them from an egg and teaching them to walk, swim, fly and climb, and sometimes expanding upon those skills to enter the Chao in races and other sporting events. Although a widely praised and well known feature even to this day, Chao Gardens have never appeared in Sonic games since then to this date, aside from very downsized handheld versions for the Gameboy Advance.

What will I be doing?
Animators will be working with various models of popular Sonic characters, all fully rigged, and will be divided into three categories, Player animators, NPC animators, and Chao animators.
-Player animators will be working with playable character models, creating their walk, run, jump, attack, and idle animations. This will involve studying the movements of each character respectively and carefully recreating their movement style, and requires moderate to advanced experience with animating.
-NPC animators will be responsible for creating animations for interactive and enemy characters. This will involve creating stuff like “reaction” animations for interactive NPCs (so that they can play a new animation depending on certain dialogue, stuff like that). This area doesn’t require more than beginner level animating experience.
-Chao animators will be working with the Chao model, and can create any animation they wish as long as it’s appropriate for the game. However, the model is one of our more complicated ones and requires intermediate to advanced animating skill to use, as it has many expressions rigged to it.

I don’t know much about animating, is there another way I can help out?
Of course! Our dev team consists of programmers, 3D modellers, graphic designers, concept artists, but we could always use more help. We need 3D modellers the most (currently we have three not counting myself), but anyone of any skill set is welcome to help out.

Where can I learn more about this game?
We currently have a website under construction, but we also post biweekly updates on another forum (keep in mind some of the first few posts on there contain outdated info as it was in the beginning stages of development): http://chao.hippotank.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=48365. For the most up to date information, visit our Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/TheChaoProject or our Discord (I have the phone app and keep Discord open whenever I’m on my PC so I’m pretty much always online there): https://t.co/nGdgLzKLN5.

If interested, you can contact me or another dev team member through any of the above links. Cheers!

I would but I have a strong hunch this will get smite down from the Copyright Gods.

It’s not as likely as you think, SEGA isn’t like Nintendo when it comes to fangames. They’ve allowed and even encouraged Sonic fangames for years, and they sometimes even try to recruit the guys who build them. This is pretty much their official stance on them: https://kotaku.com/sega-takes-shot-at-nintendo-encourages-fans-to-keep-ma-1786527246.