I'm the artist for Cardboard Robot Games. We're a new, 2-person development studio. Technically we've been around for about 3 years, but we recently signed on with a publisher for our first commercial game: Pocket Rumble, a fighting game based on the SNK fighters for Neo Geo Pocket Color. Here's a gameplay video of a really early build: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZFlSr6HqtY

I've got the character animation down pretty well for the style we're doing, but I don't really have any experience doing detailed backgrounds, so we are considering hiring an artist to do stages for the game's 8 launch characters.

Stages in our game are 340 x 128, with no hard restriction on colors. We cheat and have a gradient already in the game's logo, but for stylistic reasons it will be better if you mostly handle the shading as if you had a limited palette. All stages should animate in some way, and we will want to do parallax scrolling where appropriate.

For reference of what we're looking for stylistically, check out King of Fighters R2, SNK vs. Capcom: Match of the Millenium, or just SNK fighters in general.

The game is on track to release next summer, and you can work mostly at your own pace within that timeframe. We're flexible about how much this could pay and are mostly interested in weighing how much we like your portfolio vs. your asking price.

You can contact us at cardboardrobotgames@gmail.com

We don't have a proper website at the moment but we're @cardboardrobotg on twitter and we also have a Facebook we never use.