I'm looking for a pixel artist that can help me with a game I am creating. This is a personal project that I am developing myself and funding out-of-pocket. The game is intended to be a Christmas gift to my immediate family members. Each person will have an avatar in the game, and a personalized level. For example, one level will be my dad running around the front yard throwing firecrackers at gophers that pop up out of the ground, because my dad likes fireworks, enjoys working in the yard, and hates gophers. There will be 9 such levels.

I am using AS3 and Flashpunk to build the game and have a pretty good start. Most of the artwork will be created from freely available tilesets, but I need a skilled pixel artist to create the characters so they closely resemble my family members. I have attempted to work with a pixel artist from deviantArt, but he is extremely flaky and has not responded to any of my emails for several days. I am looking for someone new with a fair amount of experience, and decent communications skills (i.e. respond to my emails within a day or two).

I want most of the characters to be top-down J-RPG style sprites a-la FFIII or Secret of Mana, but with a bit more detail and sized at 32x64. Three descriptions of the characters can be found in this document:
The Bogstras - Character Descriptions
The document also contains a rough sketch from my original artist, and is pretty close to what I am looking for. The descriptions also reference some photos that are not included (but I will provide these to the artist prior to starting work).

Unfortunatly I do not have a huge budget for this. This is purely for my own fun and learning, and hopefully makes everyone have a good laugh around the holidays. I also intend to open source the code for the game. I can provide meager compensation, as well as full credit in-game, and on the game's dedicated website when it is released.

If you are interested, please send me a pm and we can work out the details. Also, please post any questions in the forum so others can see the responses.

Thanks,
ect

Edited by ect_2k20 - 09 October 2011 at 8:47pm