umbral gazelle
Two years in, 300+ commits, and the thing slowing me down most is my own coder-art. I'm a solo dev building a tactical card game — Gloomhaven meets Slay the Spire, Norse mythology setting, Lovecraftian horror at its core.
Tactical doesn't mean XCOM, though. No fog of war, no LOS. Encounters are small in area but large in numbers, you're overpowered individually but outnumbered. Lots of displacement and movement. Dodging isn't a card you play, it's an action you take.
On the art: dark, desaturated pixel art, sharp Norse geometry slowly giving way to formless Lovecraftian organic sprawl. References I keep coming back to: Sword & Sworcery, Darkest Dungeon, Arcanium, Song of Conquest. There's a lot of territory I haven't mapped yet and I'm genuinely open to directions I haven't thought of. I want whoever comes on board to feel real ownership of the art direction, not just execute a brief.
Rough scope: character sprites, hex grid tiles and stage backgrounds, UI, animations. The final scope can shift depending on where we take it together. I have some Aseprite experience, so if you can define a style I can mimic, I'm happy to pick up simpler work.
I work as a systems and tools engineer in the games industry. I have 15+ years across C# and C++ professionally. A lot of what I've focused on in the game is building flexible, resource-driven gameplay systems, the kind where adding a new card, enemy, or status effect is quick content iteration rather than a code change. Good engineering practices, built to last. I can't sell it much better than that, but the foundation is solid.
It is a hobby project, I've been spending 10-20 hours a week on it, on-and-off for two years. I'm open to paid commissions up front, with the hope that you'd fall in love with the project and want to continue on a revenue share basis. Open to other arrangements if you have something in mind.
Replay here or DM me if any of this sounds interesting.
zenith wyvern
autumn cypress
