[Closed] Seeking Art Director (no prior experience required)

[FulminisIctus]

About the project:
Title: Mycorrhiza
Engine: Ren’Py (release for PC)
Genres: Visual Novel, (Scientific) Horror
Content warning: The story has gore elements. Not all gore elements will necessarily need art, though, as a lot can be hinted at or described through text.
There are no sexual themes or references in the game.
Word count: Approximately 25.000 (20.000 main story, 5000 post game).
Inspired by horror manga, especially ones with body horror/face horror (Junji Ito, Masaaki Nakayama). Example manga are Junji Ito’s “Occult Transfer Student”, which inspired the premise of this story and Masaaki Nakayama’s “PTSD Radio”.

The Game’s Plot
The main character Scott finds himself in a new town without any recollection of how he got there. Everything looks fairly normal at first but reality twists the longer he stays and people’s morals start shifting in cruel and unexpected ways.
The game is divided into three acts, each with their own theme. Act 1 is about a strange plant that attracts pets (cats/dogs), transforming them into monsters, and about how people start trying to cultivate and exploit these “pet-monsters” by sending them after their neighbors.
Act 2 is about people competing over having the most “funny” looking faces after a performer comes into town, selling books on how to perform “face comedy”. Said art includes techniques such as distorting one's face, removing from it and eventually taking from other people’s faces.
In Act 3 Scott finds himself trapped in a building. Every time Scott exits and reenters one of the rooms more time will have passed inside said room. Scott has to switch between the rooms to accomplish tasks and to interact with and help people, who can’t seem to leave the rooms they are in for some reason. But the longer he takes, the likelier it is that the people inside the rooms will meet horrifying ends, starvation being one of their lesser concerns.

The script is already done (minus proofreading), but details will of course be adjusted based on the art direction.

Responsibilities:
- Creating an art direction together with the project lead.
- Creating an asset list.
- Recruitment of additional artists.
- Managing said artists (allocation of tasks, keeping track of their progress, keeping them up to date).
- Performing quality control on the delivered art and providing constructive feedback to the artists.

Optional responsibilities:
- Creation of art assets.
- Implementation of art assets.
- Help creating marketing assets.

Requirements:
- No prior art direction experience is required.
- Some experience working as an artist on a past game project or experience directing a game. Said games don’t need to be published/finished.
- Needs to be alright with horror and gore-ish elements.
- Must be 18 years or older due to the nature of the game.

Optional requirements:
- Basic understanding of the game engine Ren’Py (can easily be acquired while working on the project. Me and the programmer can help out).
- Familiarity with the works of Junji Ito and Masaaki Nakayama (their works can be skimmed through later on to get an idea of the art direction that inspired this game).

Note that since this is an uncommercial and unpaid project (the game will thus be completely free), the requirements are of course way more relaxed than what they would be for a paid project. If you don’t have any previous art director experience then this is a great opportunity to get some! I have some experience managing projects and doing audio direction, so I can help you out if you need any help with anything. If you’d rather only take on a few of the tasks instead of all of them, then that’s all good with me too.

About the Project Lead:
My name is Tim and I’m a freelance audio-guy who has worked in all aspects of visual novel audio for more than half a decade, from music composition to audio direction. I’ve poured my love for horror manga into this project, a resource that I’d love to see more horror visual novels base themselves on. “If you can’t find enough VNs inspired by body horror manga then you’ll just have to make them yourself”, so to speak.
I’d like to use the knowledge I’ve gathered working in the industry to create an interesting and engaging horror game. You can probably guess that the audio implementation will tread a more interesting path compared to the majority of VNs.
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Please send in your application to contact@tim-reichert.com.
Make sure to include your past experience in directing/art. Application deadline is the 25th of October.