Right now I'm working on an action/adventure game with an overhead, 2D view.  The basics of the game:  you play as an average joe character who is trapped in a nightmarish city crawling with zombies, and must survive until daybreak.  Board up the windows, barricade the doors, load your shotgun, and pray that you'll have a chance to survive.  Think "Night of the Living Dead".

Anyways, I'm not a terribly talented pixel artist, despite a love of all things spriteish and pixelated.  So anyone who'd be willing to donate some time to create some beautiful sprites would be greatly appreciated.  The game will be freeware, so, obviously, I have no money to pay anyone.  Basically, all I can give you is a nice, big, shiny spot in the credits, a listing on your artistic resume (hey, getting your work shown in a freeware game is better than getting shown in no game at all!), and the satisfaction of knowing that you get to be part of something cool as hell.

So, if you have a fascination and love of zombie horror flicks, survival horror games, or just good old fashioned mayhem, consider whipping out a few sprites.

The sprites need to be 32x32, and animated.  Zombies will need basic walking(or limping, shuffling, or whatever), attacking/lunging, grabbing/biting, getting hit, and death animations.  The PC and all NPCs will need walking/running, swinging(a weapon), shooting, hammering, pushing, getting hit, and death animations as well.  No specific details are necessary for the look of the sprites, so go crazy with it!

Yeah, pretty much.  Although it'll have a higher level of detail, since I believe GTA had sprites that were smaller than 32x32 (I could be wrong though, I'm basing this assumption from memory).

Wait, full over head view like old school GTA or over head zelda view?

Full overhead like old school GTA, not 3/4 view like zelda (although I considered doing it like that).

Yeah, it sucks.  I'm still trying to do all that I can, but I'm running out of little odds and ends to code up without some graphics.  Arg.

It's hard as hell to find artists that are willing to work pro bono.  Which I can understand, but that doesn't imrpove my situation much.  :-)

It's funny, because there's no shortage of programmer's who are willing to work a *lot* for free (just look at linux, mozilla, gnu, etc.).  I'd imagine that game/pixel artists would have a similar mindset, but that doesn't seem to be the case so far.

Oh well.

It looks like soon I'll have to do the art myself, and my game will suffer from "yet another ugly game with programmer art" syndrome, which seems to inflict most of the freeware games out there.

That's really true. I would like to know the reason for this. Programmers like writing code that realize their ideas, so I guess that's the reason why there are a lot of programmers working for freeware. So, when grafix guys don't like to work for free, is it maybe because they don't have fun doing grafix? They just do it for getting money and if the had enough money for living, they wouldn't do grafix at all?

My "solution" to this, myself being the author of a freeware game, was to take free available grafix. I have to admit there aren't many and I had to adapt the grafix style to the stuff I found instead of the style I wanted to have in the perfect case.

A good source I can recommend is Reiner's Tilesets http://www.reinerstileset.4players.de:1059/ . His tiles are isometric though and probably not suitable for your needs.

Yup.  The top of the player's head, and whichever parts of the body are visible from the bird's eye perspective.  Glad to hear you might be interested in helping, because I could use it.  :-)

I tried doing some myself, but I just couldn't seem to get anything looking decent.