I'm a programmer building a Symphony of the Night-style metroidvania, and I'm looking for an artist to partner with and build this with me. Someone with opinions of their own, who'll design rooms and bosses I'd never dream up and treat the world as much theirs as mine. I'm a big fan of art, I just can't seem to get it right myself, no matter how many evenings I throw at it.
That's the player character. Full transparency: I made the first version myself, but I commissioned someone to polish it up and animate that run so I could keep developing without placeholder art doing my head in. I can't afford to keep commissioning piece by piece though, and that's really why I'm here. I've been aiming at hand-made pixel art, but I'm honestly open to other styles if you have a vision for what it could look like!
The setting
A love letter to SoTN and 80s/90s British telly. A haunted broadcasting castle where the old entertainers have curdled into the bosses. An evil "Noe Dedmonds". Eldritch Teletubbies. The sort of Saturday-night host who's still grinning long after the cameras should've been switched off. The story itself is dark, about not being able to let go, but scattered with comedic relief, and ideally some very uncanny-valley characters that warp how you used to see these people.
A lot of the references reach back to the telly you'd have grown up on over here, which is most of why I'm hoping for someone in the UK who might resonate with them.
Where it's at
Full honesty on the state of it: it's early. It's running in Godot, the player character's animated and hooked up to controls, and the zones and bosses are being mapped out. The systems and code I'm happy to grind out over time on my own (or together). Art and art direction is the piece I'm missing: tilesets, enemy and boss sprites, character animation, the look of the world itself.
I won't undersell the commitment: something this size is likely well over a year of work, probably a good deal more. That's exactly why I keep saying partner. I'm not looking for someone to knock out a tileset and move on, I'm looking for the other half of a long project, someone who'll still be as into it at month fourteen as week one, and without the expectation that this is at all full time; the work happens as and when it can.
Money's a 50/50 revenue share, and I'm happy to put that in writing before we start anything. Like most passion projects, this might come to nothing. But if the idea makes you laugh and you want to genuinely co-own how it looks, with a fair split you can hold me to, I'd love to talk.
Reply here with a link to your portfolio, or add me on Discord: HandsomeStrife. (Almost) 40, he/him.
Cheers,
Dan