Hello! My name is Hazel. I've been a part of the game industry for a pretty big chunk of my life now, as an engineer and more recently as a tech & VFX artist. During my time, I've been sitting on what I guess could be considered as a "dream game" of mine:

A 2D action JRPG, which would be visually inspired by the era of gaming during the transition to CD-ROMs (think the era between Sega CD and Saturn/PS1), featuring combat inspired by games like the Kingdom Hearts series, and dealing with themes of coping with self-doubt, overcoming imposter syndrome, and overall learning how to not be afraid of making mistakes and moving forwards.

I actually had a working combat demo, which I called "Project Foxblade" (in reference to the main character, a fox boy named Leigh), a while ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9DJR7m4oUw

However, I have long since lost the original source code & assets. Recently, I've been at a point in my life where I can look at this project again, and I've been writing a brand new codebase from scratch. I have started to hit the point where I think I need help. I'm a solid engineer, a pretty good tech & vfx artist, and a decent illustrator, but honestly I'm just not up to the task of doing all the art for this. So that's why I'm looking for help here!

Currently, my main short-term goal is to start working on a new playable prototype which would hopefully be a decent slice of the game's mechanics, and at the same time work on a pitch deck we could use to potentially court publishers for funding to help with the rest of the project.

EDIT:
To give a little more detailed explanation of what this is, and what I'm looking for...
As I've mentioned it takes inspiration from basically the very tail end of the 16-bit era. The game is split between two modes, field and battle, where field is very much classic JRPG with grid-based movement, but battle takes on more of a brawler-like 2.5D view (actually heavily inspired by the original GBA release of Chain of Memories here). The combat mechanics are generally what you'd expect in an action RPG, it leans heavily on movesets, startup+active+recover periods, giving moves different i-frames, etc, so it's likely to be pretty heavily dependent on animation.
I'm looking to take a pretty healthy dose of inspiration from games like Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana for the pixel art. The game world is also populated entirely by anthropomorphic characters (taking inspiration from Klonoa, Tail Concerto, and Solotorobo).

Hello! I'm André, a professional freelance and I just loved the overall look of your game. I would love to work with your team!
This is my portifolio: https://pranta.artstation.com
If you want to contact me, you can do that via email s4poart@outlook.com or discord pranta#6159
Hope to hear from you soon!