I'm not sure if this is the right channel to go about this, but we'll see what happens!

I've been developing a video game in my spare time over the past 2 years. To this point I've done most things myself, the programming and the artwork assets...sound and music have been taking a bit of a back seat but that isn't my concern at the moment.

I'm at a point where the milestone for my first publicly releasable demo is in sight, and I need to add some polish. My home-made artwork has been okay to stand in during development, but it's not where I'd like it to be for a release.

I follow a lot of very talented artists on this site that do commissions, so I'm hoping to enlist help from one or two such people. My game project is not furry-themed, however, character and environment drawing skills will still strongly apply. Right now I'm looking to contract people for a few smaller tasks, but this will likely lead to more work later. I have a humble budget to spend (out of my own pocket), so I may need to consider bids from a few people to make sure I'm getting the art style I'm looking for at a competitive rate.

I have a developer blog going on Facebook, with some screenshots and videos of the progression of my game:
http://www.facebook.com/DualNatureDesign

Some background: The genre is a little hard to describe, but I'd classify it as a fantasy space-shooter, adventure, and RPG. It's the story of the creation of the universe, centering around Egyptian gods. I've borrowed a lot from Egyptian mythology but also taken some liberties. You play the part of the god Ra, as he rises to power - hence the working title "The Rise of Ra". The gods are not humanoid, their celestial being appears in the form of a glowing eye on the exterior of their physical body - a round shell of metal.

In Egyptian mythology, Ra is represented by an iconic eye symbol. I have adapted this to be an animated eye that blinks, has expressions, and moves its pupil to look around. Furthermore, I've applied the eye concept across the other gods but with different styling. For example, Horus the Falcon god has an eye design that looks feathery like a bird, and Khepri the Scarab goddess has curvy cusped edges on the frame of her eye that resemble a beetle.

So this is where the character drawing skills come in. I need someone who can take the basic idea from the eye designs I've already created, potentially improve upon the forms, and implement a range of animated expressions for each character. The deliverable would be a sprite sheet with the animations for each expression/emotion, plus blink animations for any sustained expressions.

One challenge I foresee is that these expressions need to be readable on a single eye with no clear direction to the center of a face, so we need to avoid ambiguity with expressions that rely on facial symmetry such as downturned eyebrows for anger and upturned eyebrows for sadness.

As environmental artwork skills go, I am currently in need of a set of space backgrounds. The game world is fairly massive so I need a set of elements I can layer in different ways to fill the area, give a sense of depth, and not look repetitive. Deliverables would be a set of hi-res dust nebulas and stars in a variety of shapes and forms (in a neutral color, so that I can tint as needed).

So if you're an artist with the interest, skill and bandwidth to do any of this and potentially more in future, please introduce yourself! If you're on Facebook you can message me through my Dual Nature Design blog, or you can even send me a private message on Furaffinity (though it may be a few days before I see it), and we can discuss further from there. Feel free to direct me to pertinent examples of your work.

My hope is to choose artist(s) and get the ball rolling on the above two tasks within the next few weeks. I look forward to hearing from you - and I may even reach out to a few artists directly.