I'm the lead artist/art-director on a project called Battle for Wesnoth, and we're looking for folks to help animate some of our sprites. We're a fantasy turn-based-strategy game, very vaguely in the line of games like Final Fantasy Tactics, or Fire Emblem - we're a game where you muster a small platoon-sized group of fantasy soldiers of various races/factions, and move them around a small battleground, trying to seize terrain advantages, and ultimately take out the opposing captain. Each of our small soldier/creature sprites is represented by a fairly detailed sprite, comparable in size to something like Final Fantasy Tactics, or Ogre Battle.   We've been an ongoing project and have been publicly playable for over a decade now - we're an open-source game that's partly driven by the community, but we occasionally use funds to bring in professionals for jobs that require higher skill caps; which is why I'm inquiring with you.

We've got a large collection of units in the game with finalized sprites, but many of them are under-animated, and we're pushing a long-term project to animate the whole set. Our units look like this example (a lizard-man soldier) posted here - remember that we're asking you to animate sprites we've already designed.




I've got at least two jobs open - there's an easier one, and a harder one, and we're likely to pay a bit more for the hard one.

The easier one is:
We've got a set of pre-existing animations for one of our cavalry units; a horseman with a lance. It's got animations of it standing, attacking, and running in 4 directions (N, NE, SE, S, fitting the tile borders of our hex tile arrangement), and some short 2-ish frame animations of recoiling from incoming blows in those directions.

In addition to this one animated horseman, we've got a full set of some 10 additional horse-mounted that share an identical pose, and were largely cloned from the same sprite (certainly the horses underneath are cloned from the same base horse sprite) - they have somewhat different equipment sometimes (swords-and-shields), and somewhat different barding, but the motion on the animations should remain the same. We'd like to hire people to take these additional horse-mounted units, and clone in the same animations that the aforementioned horseman already has.   This does NOT have to happen in one go - we're more than happy to hire them out one-at-a-time, or 3-at-a-time.


The harder one is:
We've got several lines of soldiers (our units can earn XP in battles and level up into more experienced forms with bigger, more impressive sprites - much like pokemon) which don't have walking or north-facing attack animations at all. We'd be interested in hiring someone to do those, mostly from scratch. Here, you've got a lot more choice about what you take on - we have dwarves, orcs, skeletons, and a few others in need of animation. We've got a decent number of possbilities, so I can fill you in on the whole repertoire if you're interested.


If you are in fact interested in this commission, please do get in touch with me, and we can negotiate rates and how much you'll do.   My budget is about $1-2k for this particular phase, so let's negotiate what would fit within that. I'm willing to pay more for competence and trouble-free delivery (i.e. working with someone who doesn't need remedial help doing the animations). We will have additional commissions like this available in the future, as well.


-------
Email:          kettering.richard@gmail.com
Website:          http://www.wesnoth.org/
Deadline:     1-2months
Payment:          $1000-2000
Twitter:          @JetrelArt

Other projects I'm affiliated with:   http://www.frogatto.com/