Apr 22, 2014

Join the Overland Team: Make Sounds, Freak Everybody Out

Adam here! We are actively seeking a sound designer to join our team and work on our new indie game Overland. We are also on a mission to build a more inclusive studio with more diverse teams, and so we strongly encourage applications from people from backgrounds that aren’t always represented in the games industry. If you fit this description or know people who do, we would be grateful if you could pass this posting on! I’ve got some more details about this toward the end of the post. WHAT IS OVERLAND? Overland is a turn-based survival game. It is still what we call a prototype, but if you imagine playing a board game where you move some figurines of civilians and monsters around a chessboard full of rubble, you might have some idea of what the game is like at the moment. The fictional world in which Overland takes place could be reasonably described as post-apocalyptic, empty, and hostile. Players guide a band of survivors on a long journey to… somewhere, relying on a kind of hand-me-down map that helps them find the safer places to pick up supplies on the way. This world has been picked over, though, so you won’t be finding a lot of guns, for example. There are even some good reasons to not kill every monster you see, but we don’t want to spoil too much yet… the important thing to us is that players will make some hard choices while they play, and every choice players make has consequences. One thing that we hope will make Overland stand out is that the characters you meet and with whom you travel are basically normal people. There will be doctors and mechanics and carpenters but also just moms and pensioners. Humans, as it were; not superheroes. We also have a lot of ideas about how we can illustrate relationships between survivors and the obstacles they face on their travels, but these elements are still pretty nebulous. They will play a big role in the final game though! Does this sound like something you want to work on? YES THIS IS MY DREAM PROJECT. WHAT WOULD I BE DOING? Making all sound effects, music and ambience for the whole game. Everything about the way the game sounds would be up to you. Your vision (as it were) for the soundscape is important to us. We are looking for a fourth brain to join us on this adventure, to work with us to build the best game we can. We are looking for someone who can help us to complete these weird new world we are trying to build. Your primary domain will be the sound design, but if you have ideas for new game mechanics, new scenarios, new story ideas, whatever you think would make the game better, lay it on us! For us this is what it means to be a creative partner on the project. That said, you won’t be joining a blank slate project. There are some aspects of Overland that we feel strongly about, and we are looking forward to working with you to help amplify those things and to build up the rest of the game’s audio accordingly. We are doing our best to create a flexible and communicative team environment where there is both direction and self-expression. I will do my best to articulate my ideas about what might be possible with the sound design, and I am looking forward to hearing your ideas for what this world sounds like too. WHAT DO YOU THINK IT SHOULD SOUND LIKE? I’ve been really lucky, and have had the opportunity to collaborate with some really brilliant sound designers in the past. I’ve worked on games with chippy soundscapes, cinematic backdrops, and even weirder things like Capsule. Overland is not explicitly a horror game, exactly, but I think the sound design in games like Capsule or Silent Hill is getting close to the right ballpark for what we’re building. I think the audio in The Swapper is pretty sharp too. I’ve also been referencing movies like The Thing and Alien internally, but that’s because I’m a hopeless cliché; there are probably cooler or more interesting references out there, like these amazing sub-antarctic hydrophone recordings. The thing we’re most interested in is creating something that doesn’t really sound like anything else. I know that’s not the most useful thing to say after giving a bunch of references, but maybe those references are best for getting a sense of the fidelity and detail we’re interested in, not the exact reference sounds themselves. Overland is a road-trip game, in some ways, and is about being in big empty spaces with no help, with very, very strange things surrounding you. We have our work cut out for us on the art side, to bring this to life, but we’re hoping to find someone who can step up and create an equally weird and unique soundscape to accompany the player on their journey. If you have a vision for a non-traditional, beautiful and practical approach for a game like this, we want to see it! SWEET. GIMME THE DIRTY DEETS So earlier I very specifically described Overland as an indie game, which was intentional, because it is a key part of our business model. Our goal is to build a four person team: designer (me), programmer (Shay), artist (announcing soon!!), and an audio person (you??). When the project is released, the vast majority of the revenue from the game will be divided up between the four team members basically forever. As a creative partner you will be entitled to the sort of rev share that comes along with that. To help pay the bills until release, we can also provide monthly advances. These advances must be paid back out of the rev share at launch, but hopefully they help bridge the gap between start of project and launch. This is not a salaried position, and there are no healthcare or retirement benefits associated with it. In tax terms, you will be a self-employed contractor or freelancer. The current plan is to start production on the full game in April, and launch as a paid alpha on Humble and Steam in Q3 or Q4 2014. We will probably continue active development until mid-2015, when I expect the pace of updates to slow down. Also, please keep in mind that since this is an indie game, those dates are subject to change!! We will do our very best to stick to those guns though. WHERE DO I SIGN UP Please email me (adam@finjigames.com) with a link to your portfolio ASAP. Please include the words “overland sound designer” and your name in the subject line. We are going to be looking for:

* good communication skills, ability to articulate new ideas

Mar 14, 2014

Join the Overland Team: Make Art, Decide Everything

UPDATE: I think we’ve found our artist. We’ll be making some announcements on the Overland mailing list about this in the coming weeks! A huge thank you to the insanely talented applicants. What a humbling experience! Adam here! So I have alluded to this on twitter in the past, but we are actively seeking an artist to join our team as a full creative partner on our new indie game Overland. We are also on a mission to build a more inclusive studio with more diverse teams, and so we strongly encourage applications from people from backgrounds that aren’t always represented in the games industry. If you fit this description or know people who do, we would be grateful if you could pass this posting on! More about this later… WHAT IS OVERLAND? Overland is a turn-based survival game that we have been describing internally as “868-HACK meets XCOM meets OREGON TRAIL meets LEFT 4 DEAD meets ROADSIDE PICNIC”. Make of that what you will, just keep in mind that it’s not a zombie game… Overland is still in an (advanced) prototype stage, but currently the gameplay consists of guiding a rotating cast of characters through simplified tactical encounters on a road-trip across a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Imagine you have some action figures from Stephen King’s THE STAND and HALF-LIFE 2, and you arranged them on a chess board, and hopefully you have some idea of what the core gameplay is like. The world of Overland is empty and hostile. Your survivors rely on a kind of hand-me-down map that helps them find the safer places to pick up supplies on their journey to… somewhere. Most of the really useful supplies have been taken already, so you won’t be finding a lot of guns, for example. In fact, there are some good reasons to not kill every monster you see, but we don’t want to spoil too much yet… the important thing to us is that players will have some hard choices to make in most levels, and every choice you make has consequences. We’re also working on building up some performative/expressive elements of game narrative. We have a lot of ideas about how we can illustrate relationships between survivors and the obstacles they face on their travels, but these elements are still pretty whiteboardy. They will play a big role in the final game though! Does this sound like something you want to work on? Like really want to work on? YES THIS IS MY DREAM PROJECT. WHAT WOULD I BE DOING? Making all the 2D and 3D art and animation in the whole game. Everything about the way the game looks and moves would be up to you. I am a picky dude with strong opinions and we would be working together to figure out how to make Overland into the best game that we can. In the same way that I’ll be pushing back on and influencing some of the art, though, I also invite you to push back on and influence everything else about the game: game mechanics, new scenarios, new story ideas, whatever you think would make the game better, lay it on us! For us this is what it means to be a full creative partner on the project. You will become, in many ways, 1/3rd owner of Overland. By the time the game is done it will be as much your vision as it currently is mine or Shay’s. WHAT DO YOU THINK IT SHOULD LOOK LIKE? For a variety of reasons we are currently imagining the game as having mostly 3D art, but a really strong 2D vision could probably convince us to change our minds (it just might be a bit more work? depends on the artist I guess). Games like Kentucky Route Zero and videos like Between Bears have really strong aesthetics that we think could work for this game, but we’re open to other bold ideas! Some of the practical reasons we are leaning toward low-poly 3D art include:

* looks good at lots of different resolutions

Mar 3, 2014

hello world