The art of finding an artist
I'm sure such a title has been used already but I'm feeling lazy about it.
Anyway, the last cycle has been pretty busy. Our main priorities were finding the right artist (and we did! 🐱) and grounding the look and feel of the battle scene, along with some color palettes specific to some characters.
After having a look through Fiverr and Upwork, we decided to post on Reddit first, assuming that more "passionate" artists might be lurking on subs like r/PixelArt or would be checking out lospec jobs from time to time. Note that lospec scrapes the r/PixelArt job postings, so you get that one for free. Before
anyone gets offended, we can't confirm our hunch about passion or lack thereof, but it allowed us to find an artist without looking further.
The back-and-forth communication was a messy process, especially because in the post we made I failed to specify to contact us only through email. We ended up being contacted through Reddit comments, Reddit chat, Reddit messages (the existence of both chat and messages kinda surprised me), and, sometimes, email. If you feel like finding an artist through Reddit, I'd definitively recommend being explicit about being email only.
The upside of being contacted through Reddit is that you get to see the user post history, which allows you to get to know them a bit and understand if they are into the kind of art you are looking for or not. But don't treat a lack of signal here more than warranted, not everybody enjoys being on social networks more than strictly required.
We had the privilege of getting contacted by a lot of really good artists, the one that ticked all the boxes is a great guy named Anton, which, luckily, turned out to also be based in Ukraine, which made us all the happier.
Anton started right away at making our player units come to life, the orcs are also his, but are placeholders not related to the game. I'm not gonna lie, we are pretty stoked!
Lots of stuff is still in a prototype sort of phase, this screenshot is definitively not marketing material, but we love the characters already.
The upcoming cycle is, you have guessed it, going to be pretty busy. We're in the process of moving to another apartment and my wife is taking care of most things (my Ukrainian isn't that good yet, so I'm mostly busy in the department of moving boxes, which luckily can happen after work time), but that's getting wrapped up, so we'll be able to dig deeper into the look and feel for the world scene.
We'll likely be refining the battle scene more and more, but I'm especially interested in better specifying how our skill system is going to look from the user's point of view.