What is Carbon Online? 

Oh no… another 2D MMO project! 

(TLDR arbitrary keywords: SWG, AO, SS13, Ultima Online. Zelda. Sci-FI. Rimworld. Nano-tech. Survival.) 

Carbon Online is a small 2D MMO project designed for 100-300 concurrent players. Players play the roles of colonists escaping from a dying Earth that have now crashed on an unfamiliar alien world. There is a peculiar mix of high-tech and low-tech in Carbon ranging from sticks and stones all the way up to nano-tech and AI. There is much technology left over from planetfall and the disintegration of pieces of the colony ship. The game is designed to be interactive and player-driven from the get go. They gather resources, build dwellings, manufacture goods and create factories/bases. Conflict of these resources and technologies is the main driving force of PvP in Carbon and often results in battles between player made mini-corporations and enterprises. Corporations must defend their claims and exploit their resources to prosper. Randomly generated dungeons consisting of puzzles, monsters and traps (in a vein similar to classic 2D Zelda/roguelike games) drives the PvE gameplay (with a focus on bosses, skills and gun/item-play).

What am I looking for? 

Art! Actually, one or two >people<! Artists! 

I've been working on Carbon as a solo project on and off for a long time, building all the necessary technology as I went. It's been hard! Carbon is a very complex technical project consisting of many layers from: the client (that can stream dynamic content from the server), the networking layer and the server software (that can run a complex simulation of all the NPCs, items and world). 

Trying to write all this code /and/ do all the art is too taxing! Help would be very much appreciated. Myself being unable to draw very well, is demotivating and hampering my progress. Due to this I seem to work in sprints, in which I make lots of quick progress and then stall for a few days. Usually because I have to draw something complicated, argh! I'd like to change that with your help! 

I am looking for an artist or two to help balance me out and help me work faster and produce better content! 

What can Carbon do TODAY? 

Gun fighting in Carbon is probably the biggest and most fun thing already implemented. As with all projects, there are grand plans to improve it even further. I'd like to implement many varying weapons, projectiles and styles of shooting. Currently there's an instant shot rail gun, a few variants of an energy rifle and an exploding throwable orb. Oh and acid grenades. Check the attached video for some fun night-time prototype PvP! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KHUOu6V2_g) 

The Lua powered scripting engine for Carbon is largely complete (though it's constantly evolving). It offers client/serverside scripting of networked objects that allows for fast and efficient simulation and communication of things on either end of the connection. It underpins all of the content created on Carbon and has a large focus on being dynamic and easy to maintain. Hopefully this gives Carbon the edge in putting out very regular patches! 

The level editor for Carbon is also complete. It's built right into the game! (along with the ability to script it!). It's very powerful in pushing content immediately to the development server for immediate feedback. It's fun to use! Though the amount of tiles I've drawn is very sad I'm afraid… maybe you can help? 

If you want to help me work on Carbon I'd more than happily help teach you how to use these tools to create content of your own to add to the game! I'd even teach some general programming / good practice to help you grasp all the concepts to be able to script fluently in Lua! I've had commercial software development experience in teaching modern Javascript and besides I like explaining things! It'll be great! 

What could an artist do for Carbon? 

With an artist, we'd literally spit-ball ideas of things to work on back and forth. Believe me, I've got plenty of things I'd love to implement and can't finish on my own, in any reasonable time, due to the lack of art assets. It's a very free-form project where you'd have a large say in what content we create! Carbon's a very large game that I'm constantly going to be adding to and growing. I want to build a home in this project!

I'd do all the heavy programming and implementation stuff to bring assets we create together to life. I can work quickly with good art and like-minded folk! You have an idea for a weapon? a skill? a plant? BAM! We add it and explore how it interacts with the world and players. Development for Carbon is all about being able to work quickly and explore our ideas.

What style of art is Carbon drawn in? 

Carbon is a 45 degree, orthographic, 3/4 high perspective, like a 2D Zelda game. It's very similar in fact to the LPC style guidelines (http://lpc.opengameart.org/static/lpc-style-guide/index.html)! It's a slightly squished perspective that, though I am not the best at drawing in myself, I feel fits very well with the gameplay I envision. Hopefully you like it too!

Wrapping up... 

I am looking for a good artist that wants to create a good game before anything else! Must be friendly, genuine and love interactive and dynamic games with emergent gameplay.

Does this project interest you? Do you have samples/a portfolio of your artwork? Would you be interested in putting a few hours, every so often, into some art for Carbon to help out? 

If you have any questions please, please ask away!

-Mack

E-mail: <my forum username>@gmail.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/macksaur (@macksaur)
Carbon: http://carbon.sooteverywhere.co.uk