Arcane is a fantasy role-playing game. Gameplay centers around the creation of a character through whom the player can interact with a world primarily through the game’s map. This world is wild and full of magic, with indigenous creatures of various types. The story brings some original flair to the fantasy genre, but the archetypes we're using are fairly well established.
For the images, we want something that adds a sense of character to the game, but that uses an art style that is not so specific to one artist that we will struggle to expand the game down the road. We have some samples that we’ve been working from and that we like, which we’ll include for reference below, but we’re open to a lot of options right now.
The types of images we need are as following:
Portraits. We need portraits to use for the player characters, enemies, non-player characters, and monsters. We’ve been using bust portraits so far (head and shoulders) but the whole torso would be okay too. We like having a fairly close up look at the faces, so I don’t know that we need to do head to toe. We’ll want male and female. They should be on transparent backgrounds. These samples give a sense of what we like.
Map Avatars: Each portrait should have a matching avatar that goes on the map. They will be fairly small but should be recognizable and should match up well enough with their associated portrait to make sense, although they don’t have to match precisely in every detail. Below are two types that we’ve seen. The ones on the left are okay, but we prefer the ones on the right that look less pixelated and old school.
Item Icons: The player will collect items of various types throughout the game, including weapons, various pieces of armor, scrolls, potions, and other assorted bits. We’d like a variety of icons for these. Samples below.
Skill Icons: Characters can learn a variety of skills to aid them in combat. Skills fall under the categories of attack, defense, and magic and come from four magical disciplines of earth, wind, fire, and water. We can provide details for specific skills to interested artists. Samples below.
General Icons: We will need some general gameplay icons for things like gold and books and such. Samples below.
Maps: We’ve built a tool that lets the character move around in a large map while only seeing a portion of it at a time. This tool can take any image and load it into our game, so we need maps. We would love to have a large map of the Arcane world scaled appropriately to the size of the map avatars. It should feature towns, villages, cities, and a variety of geography. We’re pretty open about this one, but we would want it to fit with the story we are writing, so there may be some specific elements we’ll want included eventually. The game also has the ability to incorporate multiple different maps accessible to each other by magical portals. They can be big or small. In the end, we love variety, as long as the overall style and scale is consistent. Some samples we’re currently using are below.
Okay, now for the agreement details.
We’re pretty flexible about what we’re after, so long as our interests are protected. We don’t need exclusive images at this point, as long as we have permission and rights to use them legally. We don’t care if someone else has used them before us or if you want to keep them to use again after us, as long as whoever else is using them doesn’t care either. We will want rights to modify them as we see fit, typically to use one image as a base to make more images with color changes and such (we can make many monsters out of one image if we make slight changes). We’re happy to give name credit and a link to contact the artist if desired. We’re hoping to generate a lot of traffic with this game, and we hope that will be a plus for the artists who provide collateral.
Now for payment.
Obviously, we would love for some talented artists to come to us and say, “Hey, you guys need art. I need my work advertised, let’s partner up,” and we’ll get our stuff done for free. We would also love for some talented artist to say, “Hey, I have some time. I can throw some images your way and you can pay me when Arcane starts making money.” However, we do live in the real world, and we understand how this goes. We’re discussing what kind of budget we would be able to allocate to this side of the game right now, so what we would like are some samples of your work and what you would charge for your services. Whatever price structure you prefer is fine, just make it easy for us to calculate, whether it’s price per image, price for a whole image set, etc.
If you're interested, please contact us
I think that about covers it. So please, if you’re interested, give us a shout. We’re actively looking for someone who can help us out here. We have a lot of ideas and plans for this game, as well as for other Train Wreck projects, and we’d love to find some quality artists who we can work with now and in the future.
If you’re interested, please send us your name and contact information, as well as some samples of your work that you think would fit what we’re after. You can contact us through our website at http://www.trainwreckgames.com/contact. If we like what you have to offer, we’ll get back in touch with you and talk in more detail.
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