Help wanted - recruitment

Here is the recruitment post I mentioned I was typing up over the past week.

We’re in dire need of new artists. Dire to the point where, we can’t release a new version until after we get new artists.

If you’re not an artist, there is another job not really art related we’re looking for, that only requires a decent image editing software. This particular one is more like a ‘favor’ and we’ll just need you until you finish it, but despite that, you will be credited in the game credits under “Special Thanks” and we’ll be eternally grateful.

Anyway, if you are interested in helping, please read these following guidelines first:

You need to have time for this. I can’t stress this one enough. I have had several people join the project (all of which artists) only to back out because they realized afterward were too busy with school. Don’t join if you think you’ll be too busy. Please, be nice to the fellow devs. We’re all supposed to be a team. You can critique others’ work but don’t be so harsh about it and try to praise them too. Keep in mind that this is at the core meant to be a fun project! Try to stay positive. We want the game to succeed, and you too must believe that it will. You need a Discord, we have a dev chat where we discuss the game, and also one of these jobs will require cooperation with other devs and Discord will make it easier for everyone to stay in contact.



Under the cut is specific information about the positions. (Remember, one isn’t really art related and just requires a decent editing software!) Please read them if you’re still interested so you know what they entail.

Designer:

A designer designs the outfits that the characters will wear in this AU. Since the theme is medieval fantasy, you can be creative with them and take inspiration from other medieval fantasy game character designs if you wish, but I must ask that you please refrain from unrealistic fanservicey design choices, such as “boob plate titty armor” and unrealistically short skirts. The only characters who should have particularly fanservicy designs are the ones that it would make sense for. We’ll discuss that topic more in private.

I made a post about this a few days ago, but since there are so many characters to design, that it is quite a taxing job. So myself and Munakata I decided that there will be multiple designers, with certain characters assigned to you to design based on what they are best at designing or what characters you like most, but if multiple people want to design the same character, you guys need to be able to reach an agreement.



If the designers worked together, giving each other feedback, there would be relative continuity between the outfits that wouldn’t be apparent through the spriter and portrait editor’s work shown in-game. Remember that the designers’ work is behind the scene stuff for the portrait editor and spriter to work from. But tldr, you NEED to be able to work together with others!



Send in a proposal demonstrating your skills. We won’t accept you if you don’t.

Portrait editor:

A portrait editor basically makes these, for usage in textboxes for dialogue.

For the most part, you’ll be looking at the references that the designers drew, and edit the clothing from there.



In order to be accepted, you need to be good at replicating DR’s style, because it can’t look like a clash between styles when you edit the DR sprites to make the portraits.



Some characters will need more major edits that isn’t just about clothes, for example, we want some of Fukawa and Syo’s DRAE sprite poses to be made into their DR1 sprite style (the color palette along with having her hair in braids, idk how else to put it.) Certain characters, such as Komaru, will need her sprites edited to look more like she did in Naegi’s video. So yeah the edits aren’t just about clothes.



That all said, this job can be quite taxing, given all the characters, so please keep that in mind. But also keep in mind that you’re not doing everything at once, and there will be breaks between while you’re waiting for the designers to finish designing the characters’ outfits.



We might accept more than one portrait editor, since some people are better at editing clothes, while other people are better at editing hair, which some sprites will need but mostly it’ll be just clothing edits. We’ll see.



Send in a proposal demonstrating your skills. We won’t accept you if you don’t.



Artist:

This position can be fulfilled by a designer or portrait editor, but I figured I’d also mention this on here while I’m at it. We also need someone who can make DR-esque event images. An ex-member of the team who I don’t like talking about edited some of the event images from DR1 into scenes from this game to use for a similar purpose, such as this one:



However, we’d like someone who can make stuff like this from scratch instead of just editing because this game is much different from the main series so different stuff happens and not everything can just be an edit.

It would also be nice if there can be one designated person who can make “official art” of the playable characters in this kinda fashion for promotional purposes, like for the eventual trailer:

Speaking of promotional stuff, I have been saying this for a long time but we really need this blog’s sidebar image changed and the artist can also make that.

Someone to make ‘placeholder portraits’:

This is the non-art related help I was talking about. We really need the current character portraits out of the game, asap. Really badly. We’ve had this problem for nearly a year now and it’s made it hard to work on the game for reasons.

So we need someone to take the normal unedited dr sprites from the original games and make them into placeholder icons. I’d like to have your Discord too for this, because it’ll just make things easier. Like I said earlier, you don’t really need art skills to do this, you just need a decent eye and an image editing software that supports layers and transparency.

If anyone wants to help out with this, we’ll be eternally grateful. I’ll let you be a beta tester as well as your name will appear under “Special Thanks” in the credits.

____________

Please consider joining because I don’t want to give up on this project.

-Fukawa