Village the Game: Play it. Love it. Live it.

Need video game artist with multiple skills:

2D concept art, level design, 3D character design and animation. The ideal candidate has experience with the game engine Torque Game Builder. Getting artwork to render nicely isn't trivial for someone starting fresh. We need somebody who can meet frequently with the producer in Palo Alto over the next 60 days. We are working to put a demo out by January to get real-world feedback and to start pitching the game to more investors.

Village the Game is an early stage startup founded this past May by Darian Hickman. Our mission is to promote awareness of social enterprise (eradicating poverty through profits) and to get more people involved in third world development. We got press way earlier than expected on WorldChanging.com, NextBillion.net, WorldBank.org and several blogs, so we are targeting January 2007 to release an alpha of Village and get some real world feedback. Game demo design is complete. The first round of 2D concept art for buildings is complete, but we can change to make sure it matches well with other level art. Also, VillagetheGame.com website, a Village collectible card game, and the RTS demo are all under development right now.

Fully developed, Village is a multiplayer real-time strategy game for the PC that immerses the player into the role of an entrepreneur building companies to bring prosperity to the villages of the third world.

We need help with finalizing the style of human characters, the style of terrain, and style of buildings, etc within this game. Right now we're going for a more cartoony look than realistic, because quite frankly most RTS games that go for realistic don't have enough personality. The map, characters, and other objects need to look distinct similar to Warcraft II or III. Games like SimCity have really realistic-looking buildings but are easy to get confused. Regarding size of maps, characters, objects expect all the same proportions as Warcraft II. In fact our current placeholder map is something I hacked together in the Warcraft II map editor and replaced the W2 buildings with our current buildings. Also the layout of the HUD, mini-map, and menus will mirror Warcraft II to a large degree.

For our first level design we're looking for a town market center of a variety of buildings plus farmland laid out beyond the center, with water features (ponds, streams, lakes), forest, etc. Since the appearance of the village changes as the village economy changes we have to create artwork for at least 3 phases of economic development. Keep in mind this is all from an RTS top-down isometric view like Warcraft II. We won't be rotating or zooming the camera in and out or anything crazy like that.

TGB allows 3D animations to move around on a 2D background so buildings and other objects could be left as 2D sprites if need be.

The perfect sample of your talent would be seeing a villager using a Kickstart MoneyMaker Pump (see cover art) to water his farmland, all from an RTS view of course. This should show a little terrain, farmland, a person using the Kickstart pump. Keep in mind the style doesn't have to match our cover art. We can change that too. We're considering anything from the minimalist style of Ecomagination, to anime style, to Virtual Villagers cartoony style.

Compensation: $8,500.00 for 60 days. $5000.00 distributed over milestones plus a $3500 bonus when Village hits $50,000 in sales.

Engineers, artists, and designers who "get it" and demonstrate passion and commitment to Village will be considered for company partnership. If you want to be a part of making this game a reality please contact Darian Hickman: firstname.lastname@villagethegame.com

Here's what's been going on lately with Village both on game dev and business dev goals. This post is intended for those working on Village the Game directly but I wanted to see if other netizens had something to say about it.

• Jason found a web developer to donate time to VillagetheGame.com. Currently we're refining the specs for the new website and trying to schedule a meeting to make sure we're all on the same page.
• Anton just released a new version of Village on TGB. Geoff's buildings on the Warcraft II placeholder map are all in place. Now we're moving on to Nov 30th deliverables with a migration to NullSoft from InstallShield to see if that solves installation issues. Also we're migrating code to the subversion repository that Daniel set up for us on his server. I want to be able to checkout files that Anton and Daniel have checked in, run a build script and have the updated version running without having to reinstall constantly. Anton, Daniel let me know how hard this is.
  
• Geoff Castro's 2D buildings are done. He's sent me the source Painter and Photoshop files. So we can close the chapter on creating "Village Map".
  
• Jason is generating leads for accountants and lawyers to serve on the Board of Advisors for VillagetheGame.com
• Stanford really is a breeding ground for social enterprise. Just from hanging out with the Graduate Chrisitan Fellowship on campus, I've met two people very tied to social enterprise who can offer useful feedback on our simulation and I have learned a lot about how programs are structured here to incubate social enterprise projects. The MBA program looks even more promising after attending an information session today. They are even ramping up their entrepreneurial electives as well as their international requirements.
  
• Blake has finished most mods to the flash intro for the website. We're running into problems with streaming the mp3 file. It doesn't stream by default and takes forever to load without streaming. Hopefully we can resolve this soon. We're taking a lot of inspiration from the design of Ecomagination on this flash intro. Anton and I, in fact, talked about using this for art inspiration as well within the demo. It would be a big switch up, though so a new visual feel would really have to be worth it.
  
• Darian has refined further the specs for Village RTS. What I have to work on now is refining what specific visual changes of the map to trigger, and also what events or threshold values of the village economy will trigger them.
• The hunt for animators, level designers, sound designers, and musicians is going well. There some quality leads for each. The timelines they are telling me to get things done are sounding good as well.
• Darian has created a more specific story board for gameplay of the Nov 30th deliverable.
  
• Darian created a new Google Group today just for business infrastructure stuff so Anton and Daniel won't get flooded with messages and documents unrelated to building the demo. Sorry about that Anton, Daniel. If you look at the file or pages sections of Village RTS you'll see I cleaned it up a bit, too.

Much has been going on as you can see, and much is to be done.

Labels: achievements, status, villagthegame.com