Emerald Ties Recruiting BG Artist

[Gamerdude]

Emerald Ties is in need of a BG artist! Blyde, our dedicated sprite artist, is very busy with fulfilling all of our other sprite needs (badniks, gimmicks, characters, etc), and with only so many hours in a day cannot keep up with both that and creating background sets. For those of you unfamiliar with Emerald Ties I've included screenshots below from our current demo that we'll be showing at SAGE. I've also linked to the most recent (if you can call it recent >_>) demo from SAGE 2008. Keep in mind that the soon to be released game demo is much more polished and a lot has changed internally since this older one .

Skip to the bottom TLDR section if you wish to for-go all the history and stuff!

SAGE 2008 Demo

To give a little history, the game started back in 2006 and was called Emerald Ties: Crossing Fates. We had a very good run when the game saw it's first SAGE, which was either 2006 or 2007. People seemed to have a great time with the game in general, but also with the online time attack leaderboards . Initial development was speedy, but as it was started only a year before I started college, things slowed down significantly after college started. Adding to the troubles was the fact that we never had our own dedicated background artist. We would generally have to resort to using someone else's left over BGs, asking someone working on another game to make one for us, or taking time away from someone else's work to try creating one ourselves. Obviously none of these solutions ended very well. This has always been the largest plague on Emerald Ties. The project was put on hiatus in 2008 after work had all but stopped. Lack of BG creation was one of the more frustrating points that caused progress to halt.

Naoshi, Blyde, Rael, and myself have recently picked up working on Emerald Ties again at the start of this year, however due to personal reasons Rael could not continue work shortly into our revival. As SAGE closes in and we try to tie up some loose ends before the event hits, I wanted to reach out to the community and see if anyone would be interested in joining our team. We are a pretty laid back, but passionate group. We are all busy with our normal lives as well, so this isn't a team moving at breakneck speed. That being said, we put our due time in and finish things when they need to get done/know others are waiting on us.

Current team members:

Myself - Engine/Level Design/Misc. non-artistic things

Naoshi - Level Design/BG

Blyde - Sprites/BG assistance

TLDR:

What we're looking for is a motivated individual to create BGs/level tiles/level art (whatever you care to call it ) for Emerald Ties. We use "Genesis" style backgrounds, but while we lean towards the "Genesis" style, we strive to have our BGs be original. Plainly put, we don't like to recolor/rehash what's already been done. If you're interested and think you could meet our needs, please send me a PM or IM me (emeraldcaladbolg). If you have a sample of something you've done in the past, that would be greatly preferred. This way we can see what you're capable of and seeing if your style will be a good match for the game. Lastly, this should go without saying but I'll mention it anyway, please only express interest if you're legitimately interested in working on this project and have the skills to do so.