Seeking Modelers and Animators for 2.5D Platformer!

Jobs Volunteer Work
1

The type of game is just an old-school hop and bop platformer, similar to, say, Mario, or Donkey Kong Country ( Returns ).

The game stars a young, tribal kitten of a girl named Maowi. Maowi however, is, well… kinda a wuss. How much so? She’s scared of her own shadow. Not so bad? Well, see, when she’s scared, she panics. And when she panics…lots of things end up broken. Exiled from her tribe, she wanders the jungle, starving… but soon gets wind of a legend of an inexhaustible food supply by a wandering forest sage. Extremely hungry and despondent, she figures it’d be nice to live there, and, sets off to find it…completely unaware of the many dangers standing between her and her food.

However…a greedy and gluttonous treasure hunter also hears about it, by chance- and he’s planning on staking his claim there as well, and leaving none to share! Hence, it’s up to Maowi to run, jump, swing, cling, and in some cases, scream to find her edible treasure nest before that mean ol’ hunter gets his greedy mitts on it!

The project is unfortunately unpaid at the moment, although we are planning to put it on Kickstarter (and/or Desura) once we’ve got enough done.

The style is cartoonish and vibrant, similar to, for example, Donkey Kong, Klonoa, NiGHTS, and as it is primarily a hop and bop platformer with emphasis in challenging level design, what we need at the moment are 3D modelers and animators capable of executing a cartoonish, exaggerated style, similar to what is seen in the concept art below and the game styles stated above. At the moment, I am executing the game’s design and developmental direction, however I am also doing a bit of programming. At the moment, it is me, and a friend who is doing the concept artwork. We also have a general programmer available.

The main character:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5095961/Maowi%20final.png

The bad guy:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5095961/baron_concept_color2.png

And some of the bosses:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5095961/maowi_mercenaries.png

Contact can be reached at [email protected], Skype via prominenceflare or via PM over this site.

Thank you for your time.

2

Will there be modelling sheets to work off? Or do the artists get some amount of free reign? Are you looking for only one artists or many? (Too many cooks spoil the cake, but sometimes some cooks only do icing.) What type of polycount and texture size were you looking at? Will it be OGL or multitexture? How will the collaboration be done? And what about file sharing? Or a list of what needs to be done still? Sorry if it is too many questions… But this sounds very interesting.

3

1: There will be modeling sheets, absolutely. There’s a particular style/look I’m hoping for, but I am okay with some slight (that’s a keyword) deviancy.

2: Ideally, I’d be looking for 2 or 3 modelers and probably 2 animators- one to do the primary character/bosses/important folks, another to do basic enemies. I say this simply because I HATE having one person do all the work; seems unfair to me.

3: Polycount for these characters, I don’t see breaking beyond 10k tris. This is flexible to a point, but I don’t want the counts to be TOO high. We’ll see. Texture size, 512x512. These textures aren’t planned to be too complicated at all.

4: I am uncertain as to what you mean by those terms- if you explain the differences, however, I’m positive that I can answer you.

5/6/7: The collaboration will be done primarily over Skype, using a mutual Dropbox to share assets- as the game is being done in Unity, that’s about our best bet for file sharing and still keeping things in hand. I also make certain to keep documentation as to what is done, doable, and can be put off in terms of development, and have a general game design document already written out for the project- I consider that my strongest point in terms of development.

Should you have any other questions, feel free to ask.

4

Thanks for the answers. What I meant in the question was only related to the Blender Game Engine. I was asking if you would be using OpenGL (OGL) or Multi-Texture shading modes, but you are using unity.

5

I’m interested, where do we sign up?!

6

Just send an email to me stating you’re interested, and we’ll go from there. If not that, a Skype message saying the same. I plan for us to have weekly meetings to discuss objectives and developmental progress, and we’ll have to determine when is best for that. (If it’s not feasible, we may just make a forum or somesuch.)

7

This project seems interesting and I would like to join in, I have a few questions.
Have you made a game with unity before? (If you have can you give a link?)
10K tris models looks high, are you going to use rendered images of them or are you planing on using skinned meshes ?
If you are using skinned meshes how many will be on screen at a given time?

8

1: Unfortunately, not a full game, done some basic stuff to test out platforming, and a racing game (that I really want to get back to one day). I’m honestly not certain if the example for racing is still online; I’ll need to do a bit of digging for it. Mostly I do the written aspect of games I’m involved on- GDDs and organization things and whatnot.

2: 10k tris is the upper limit (for the main characters/bosses, to boot), so don’t worry about this being an immensely high poly game. The models are planned to be rendered, however.

If you’re interested further, please contact me via email or Skype, with modeling/animation examples (depending on what you want to do.)

9

Bumping, if no one minds- I’m still seeking riggers/animators, primarily.

10

I’d like to give rigging/animating a go. have you got the models yet?

11

Indeed, we have a model that could use rigging or two- and you’d be good, judging from what I’ve seen on your blog. Could still use other modelers, however.

Do you have any particular contact information? Skype would be preferable.