I need a team to finish building a FOSS 2D JRPG

[Roots]

I've been working on a 2D JRPG titled Hero of Allacrost for a long time now. Its very close to reaching a 1.0.0 release by the year's end. A development release (kind of like a preview) will also be ready sometime next month. But I have one problem...I'm working by myself right now. Because it's a no-profit, all-volunteer endeavor, the project tends to have cycles of high activity and low activity. The first half of this year was low activity, and now it has picked back up again, but the others who were working on the team last year have yet to return.

This is an opportunity to get some early gratification and make an impact in a large, polished title very quickly. Don't worry; this won't be a situation where I just tell you what to do and what to make. Even at this late stage in the game, there's a lot of room for design improvements. And in certain areas I trust other people's judgement more than my own, so I want people to be engaged with the design. These are the roles I'm looking to fill over the next couple of months.

• C++ Programmer: the major area needing help right now is the battle system, polishing its existing operation and adding new features
• Pixel Artist: we're missing a handful of sprites and map artwork and really need some help replacing our current placeholder art
• Traditional Artist: character and location portraits, as well as backgrounds for battles and other scenes
• Designer: design work includes battle and stat growth formulas, UI menu layouts, balancing, and possibly map design as well
• Writer: needed to improve the current set of dialogues and create a storyboard for a sidequest

Does this sound interesting to you? If so, here's some additional information

• How to join - steps, general advice, and what you can expect if you decide to join
• Roadmap - this is up-to-date as of this post and gives a high level overview of what has been done for this release and what remains to be done
• Source repository - mostly of interest to programmers who want to take a look at the code. Our issue/bug tracker is also found here
• Artwork samples - in case you're curious about the graphical style (there are screenshots on the website as well, but they are all pretty old at this point)

There's additional Allacrost content on our website and you can find some gameplay videos on youtube. Questions? Ask me here and I'll be happy to answer anything. Thanks!

[c_xong]

Good luck on finding members . Do you have money? Perhaps you can pay for help, using a platform like bountysource.

This won't really help you, but unpredictable development pace is a common problem for FOSS projects, so I think it's best to finish a small, usable product quickly and allow it to be improved incrementally, so that the project is never "unfinished" at any stage - similar to the Agile methodology. I guess this development model is very hard for JRPGs since it depends on a narrative - I'm not a writer, but is there any way to write a story incrementally? It would be cool if it was possible.

[Roots]

I have money, but I don't feel that it would be right for me to pay someone to do work on this game when there are so many others (including myself) that have done so much work without any pay already. I just feel like that wouldn't be fair to them. And we've managed to pull in a lot of open license artwork from sites like opengameart.org, so we're getting by.


Totally agree with everything else you said. When this project got started, we were all very young and naive about how much work a full-scale RPG would be. The story has been written incrementally since the beginning, and we always intended to release the game a chapter at a time rather than the entire thing all at once. We've already released "chapters" in the form or mini-RPGs though demos we released in the past, but this will be the first chapter released for the true story. I don't feel that you have to know the whole story start-to-finish before you can begin building a game from it. It can be a little frustrating for composers and artists who don't have that complete context, but other than that it's been working out fine for us.

[Roots]

Our team has grown a bit since my initial post, but we're still hurting for help. Especially in the art department right now. I'm the only one working on art at the moment, and I'm stretched thin as it is. On the plus side though, I think my artistic skills have leveled up a bit from the latest work I completed Although I can't take full credit as Jetrel did most of the original wall and floor designs.


Available on OpenGameArt.org