Help Wanted

Structure of the Team

We're looking for assistance for our debut title, The Ditty of Carmeana.

Team members would join the team and contribute in their free time. This is a volunteer project: team members don't get paid. However, we do have commercial aspirations for this game, and so all team members will have to sign a contributor and non-disclosure agreement. Should we ever manage to sell the game, team members would get a cut of sales.

Types of help needed

Heretofore, I've worked on The Ditty of Carmeana entirely alone. But it's quite a large and broad game, so yeah, I need help.

This listing isn't position-by-position, but rather task-by-task. It's ok, and probably necessary, for a single team member to take on different tasks.

• 3D Modeling

  The Ditty of Carmeana is a comedy that has conveniently, er, deliberately low-detail graphics. The game is quite large so we'll need a quite a few models.

  Briefly, we're looking for these sorts of models:

  • Static scenery: buildings, landscapes, interiors, dungeons, and so on.
  • Characters.
  • Animals and Vehicles (they're pretty much the same category in this game).
  • Miscellaneous other things (weapons, items, food).

  I have created a good bit of scenery myself. Some of it even looks pretty good, but I am probably an average artist overall. Thus, we're also looking for someone to do detail work on preexisting models.

• 2D Artwork

  Here are some 2D tasks we will need.

  • Concept art for the 3D models.
  • An icon set. (And be prepared to make some strange icons.)
  • Textures for the 3D models.
  • Banners and shields and heraldry stuff.
  • Miscellaneous 2D things that pop up in the game.

  Also, we're planning to embed a smaller 2D game, and we might need artwork for that, but we're not sure what that would entail yet.

• Animation

  We're looking for someone to create character animations for combat, some cut scenes, and general movement.

  We also need people to create/edit conversation input files. Basically, because the dialog is a big part of the game, I have written a "conversation engine" that allows one to specify sequences of events (such as in conversations), including character activities and camera cuts, using an input file that looks a lot like a screenplay. It works great for simple chats (such as when walking up to random people and talking). It's very unwieldy, however, for action cut scenes.

  Later on, we might animate action cut scenes directly in a 3D modeling program (rather than patching actions together with the conversation engine), but it's a low priority at this point. To be honest, I'm not so sure the clunky action cut scenes don't add to game's camp value.

• Sound

  I am a total audiophobe.

  So far, I've added a couple sound effects, and have begun work on the toolchain for incorporating dialog (right now it's just captions).

  That's it.

  I've done nothing at all with music. All of the background music needs to be selected/composed, arranged, performed (though for this game synthetic sound will do), edited, and integrated. There are lots of sound effects that need to be added.

  There's also dialog that we need to record, and edit, integrate. Which is more work than it looks.

  And one thing that's kind of a big deal for this game is synchronizing dialog with captions. The reason it's important for this game is timing. In comedy, timing is everything, and having captions appearing before the words are spoken can ruin a punch line. (Personally, I watch comedy movies with captions turned off, even if the sound quality isn't so great, because I don't want the jokes to be ruined. However, I wouldn't want the user to turn off captions in this game since the captions form the basis of some good jokes.)

  Aside from programming the code to play the sounds in the game, and the bit of the dialog toolchain I mentioned, I've done none of this.

  So, yeah, we'll need a little help here.

• Writing

  This is a big need for a comedy game; probably the most crucial, in fact. I think I have a good sense of humor, and can identify funny situations, but I'm not always the best at delivering a punch line.

  Therefore, we are looking for comedy writers who are interested in taking their writing to a more interactive medium than, say, television or stand-up. The writer should have plenty of gaming experience (since this game parodies gaming), and experience writing for video games never hurts. However, we are looking for a comedy writer first, and a video game writer second.

  Again: writers must be able to write comedy.

  The style of comedy is spoofy and zany, in the style of Mel Brooks and Monty Python, though of course doses of other styles (satire, slapstick) can creep in as long as they don't change the overall tone.

• Game Design

  We need game designers to help with things from details of combat, to storyboarding and scenario work, to user interface.

  I've designed the game from a conceptual, overall point of view. Or, rather, the fine folks at Nintendo and elsewhere did it, since this game is a parody of their games and the design followed naturally. I've also necessarily designed aspects of the game in an informal way as I developed it. Still, we will need help pulling the details of the game together.

• Programming

  I basic pretty much have the game engine taken care of, and for the near term most programming needs I will handle myself. The game engine and toolchain are quite mature and functional. Most of the programming work henceforth is either maintenance of the code, or adding breadth to the codebase (new types of object, new dynamic behaviors, new scene areas), but no major refactoring.

  However, we could use a programmer to handle various programming details (such as details of melee combat, enemy AI, user interface, and so on), and so letting me focus on the high-level design of the game and toolchain.

  The game is written in Python, with some extensions in C.

• Integration

  We could use help integrating things from different contributors into the game. This includes stuff like tidying up Blender files and running the toolchain, editing XML files, and even adding a little Python code here and there. Essentially, integration is working the toolchain.

• Agent

  We need someone (or some people) on the team to handle business relations, procurement, fund-raising, and stuff like that. And hopefully at some point negotiations.

  Whoever acts as an agent should have a good knowledge of the industry, of course, but we're not too insistent on that. That can be learned. We're more worried about personal skills and tenacity. (On the other hand, a game development studio is very different from other businesses, and it's important that someone acting as an agent is ware of the differences.)

Contact

Interested in helping out? Let us know.

Contact us at team@tamperedevidence.com. Be sure to provide a resume and portfolio.