Help Wanted!
As with any project with ambitious goals, we're not going to be doing it alone. As a fangame, we don't have the budget to pay for a ton of artists, graphics designers or anything like that. In fact, right now most on the people contributing to the project are covering more than a single role! That's normal, but, for those of you interested in the project, we're looking for help!
The good news? We have some of the biggest fires put out. Our lead programmer, Vector, has programmed us a custom made engine for ASH that gives us the freedom to do whatever we want without the constraints or bloat of modern plug and play engines. Our audio engineer, Easy93, not only makes sounds but balances the audio so that things will always sound crisp and clear. We also have additional help from longstanding community members that have helped provide modeling, level design, and art advice in order to get us this far. However, in order to make the leap from tech demo to full fledged game, we're going to need to fill a lot of holes and it's going to take some time.
As a bit of a way to tide things over while we build up our next release, we've decided to start putting out some older content. As such, we've added MMLEx 5.29 to the downloads page. It's not much, but it can give a glimpse to what was a prototype to the original ASH engine. Enjoy.
What are we after?
While it's obvious we won't be able to reach our goals with just the people around the project, there are a few areas where we're lacking that are directly impacting development speed and stretching people thin.
Character and Environmental Concept Artists
Making a new game requires a lot of new art. While working from the Mega Man Legends series has given us a leg up over an original project, there's still a lot of work to be done. From characters, to new reaverbots, ruins, buildings, the island, and much, much more, we're going to need a lot of art!
Right now, an environmental artist could help speed things up greatly, especially when it comes to the visual design of ruins. We haven't even started the 3D work on our above ground world, so there's a ton that needs to be investigated there.
Unlike other kinds of art, concept artists aren't necessarily required to stick to a single style. Sometimes it can even help to get multiple styles. However, consider that the final project is meant to take place in the Mega Man Legends universe, so we have some framework toward how we want the final project to look. Having lots of artwork to work from eases the creative strain on 3D modelers and helps everyone see what something is going to look like before a ton of work is put into making the finished version.
Texture Artists
You might have noticed that we didn't have many textures in our License Test demo. That was intentional - we simply didn't have the resources to texture the whole place. Most of the textures we had were from previous iterations of the project, and we decided it'd be best to make it look incomplete on purpose as not to give off any false promises.
We'll need environmental textures, and textures for models, such as characters and reaverbots. Our engine will continue to evolve and we can add features as necessary to assist artists. Our art style isn't very defined yet and we're probably going to try different directions in order to create a pleasing look that fits the Legends world.
3D Animator
We don't currently have a dedicated 3D animator. In order to add in new movement techniques, enemies, and even various objects, having someone experienced in animation and handling rigs would help a lot.
It would streamline things greatly to have someone handling animation instead of constantly pulling people off of other things to make WIP animations just to get something into the game. There are also some animations that we just don't know how to handle, such as the wall jump.
Models are currently exported from Blender into a custom format for our engine.
3D Object/Environmental Artists
Our ruins were also kept fairly simple in the modeling department. That's because we had an audio engineer doing a majority of the ruins! Being able to model 3D environments and objects would allow us to make a much more complete look without having to rely on other people to pull double duty.
Our engine currently supports files from Blender using a custom built exporter. It's possible we could support other modeling programs as needed, however. We would show an example, but we're so lacking there isn't really anything to show!
Level and Puzzle Designers
Okay, you probably understand by now that our core team may be a little lacking in the art department. Let's actually get to something where you don't have to be a great artist to contribute.
Beyond just looks, in order to bring the world of Mega Man Legends to life, you need to have well designed ruins. We're looking to evolve the gameplay beyond what was explored in the original Playstation titles, with more devious puzzles and an intricate ruin network more akin to modern series, such as Metroid Prime. We want tons of hidden secrets and paths for players to keep finding as they explore the ruins and make it their home.
A look ahead
If you're looking to assist ASH and we didn't list something you're good at, still message us. This is just a quick overview of a couple of positions we know we need. Our next demo is going try to expand things in every direction
With our next demo, we plan to try to give players a more complete look at ASH. There may not be a tremendous amount of content, but we plan to finish more of the gameplay concepts and push forward with the visual design and engine. We want to give a real glimpse of the project with more polish that you'd expect from a completed game and less of that tech demo feel. If you want to be a part of our team, you can message us on our twitter or join our Discord Server!