u/TheRobertLamb

Hi, guys

Last time I posted here about 7 months ago, I found Adam, a fantastic game developer. The two of us have been working on "We Got Guys" together since then and have made good progress.

Now we’re looking for one or two more people. A developer and an artist or, if someone here is a mad multi-disciplinary type of mf who thinks they can do both, we're definitely open to that too.

Here's the info for the positions and more about the game and a small WIP demo below that:

1. Unity developer.

You’d work with Adam on the dev side.
- Useful skills: Unity, Git, 2D game dev, UI work.
- No need to be a senior dev. What matters is that you can understand existing work, make steady progress, and communicate clearly.  

1. 2D artist

 

You’d be working mostly with me, Rob, on the art/content side.

Non-skill requirements:
- CSP EX (I have the multi-device subscription, I will share access),
- Windows (because CSP file objects use absolute paths and seem to bread down when moved between different OS path structures. If you know a clean solution to this, I would love to hear it, but otherwise, we both have to be on Windows )
- We do not use AI-generated artwork. We sometimes use LLMs for code help, but all artwork is hand-made. Just saying. 

The actual work would include things like:
- at first mostly taking rough sketches/notes and turning them into finalized character/object art, matching the existing visual style, making and naming file objects, importing artwork into Unity
- after getting used to the workflow working more in parallel with me: sketching yourself instead of taking sketches from me, finalizing, designing, and building out content, helping plan scenes and level compositions. Just generally contributing more in terms of deciding and creating, not implementing, if that makes sense?
- Huge bonus if you have interest (maybe even experience) in coloring. The game is B&W, but there is some logbook artwork we’d love some coloring for as well. Not a requirement, though. 

For both positions we’re looking for a time commitment. If we’re lucky enough to end up having to choose between people, that’ll likely be the main deciding factor, everything else being equal.

Obviously, this is unpaid/rev-share, so full-time is not expected and corporate bs is kept to a minimum. We’re just looking for someone to contribute consistently and hopefully be along for the long-term so that, among other things, the eventual revenue split decisions stay simple, if the game does make money. 

Your time zone pretty much doesn’t matter. Adam and I are already scattered between Canada and Latvia, so wherever you are, don’t worry about that. We are used to waiting 8h+ for responses. 

More about the game:

As I said before, Adam joined about 7 months ago, and I've been working on the game myself for about a year now. 

The game is called We Got Guys, it's an atmospheric, story-rich hidden object game. It works on two levels/modes.

First mode: a regular hidden object game with no story, think something like Hidden Folks or Travellin Cats Around the World. No timers, just a sort-of cozy, atmospheric experience. Find all the people and animals and move on to the next level. If you like hidden object games, you’ll know exactly what you’re getting.

Second mode: enabling the story mode gives the player access to all the bulk of the mechanics in the game. Most found characters have something to say (speech bubbles). Every time you click something — whether it’s a person, a car, even a dumpster outside a restaurant — it updates a massive logbook/journal in the background. You start building a web of stories and connections between a ton of characters (over 130 people and animals already in the first level), plus objects, places, and storylines. And they all have to live somewhere, right? They all have parents. Some have kids, connections, lovers, friends, enemies, dreams, regrets, secrets. The world feels lived in — everything ties back into something or someone else, either in this level or another. You don’t have to care about the story, but if you do, it’s all there waiting for you.

There are a bunch of other mechanics to support this gameplay experience that I would love to share with you in more detail privately, if you're interested in the project.

Another important part of the project is User Generated Content. Once we're mostly done with developing the base game (story mode with full mechanics, standalone hidden object mode) we plan to begin development on a level editor for players. We want to let players create their own worlds, where they can either tell stories or just make their own hidden object levels to play with friends. The idea is that players would be able to browse community levels, rate them, play featured level-of-the-day/week. At first we plan to use our own assets for these levels, but the goal is to allow users to also make and add their own assets so they're not limited by our art style. 

But that's a good bit down the line. The crucial part is fully developing the base game to a point where most of the heavy lifting is art+writing to put together further levels.

We have some monetization plans, which, for now, is too early to go into detail on, but the main idea is a mix of at least two things. One, we release the base game for free on Steam with the first 3 to 5 levels, with additional levels being paid to support development costs and buy ramen. Two, Patreon paid tiers with in-game perks like voting on storylines, submitting names for places/objects etc. A monetization strategy is important, but without the game it doesn't matter, so we are focused very much on the game first.

Here is a google drive folder in which you will find:

• The game design document
• The current object sheet
• Level 1 design (with some aspects differing from the final level layout in Unity)
• Level 2 early sketchout (VERY EARLY!!! DON’T JUDGE!!! :D)

We've put together a small demo build just for this post, mostly just showcasing the WIP first level. The layout is nearly final, the sound design is WIP, the logbook (TAB) is WIP. A lot of things are still missing, but at least this can give you a bit of a look at what we're going for.

Demo: https://stankmoody.itch.io/codename-wgg 

Here are some keyboard shortcuts/controls.

Key	Action
Tab	Open / Close Logbook
W / A / S / D or Arrows	Pan Camera
Right Click (Hold)	Drag Camera
Mouse Scroll	Zoom In / Out
U	Reset Filter
I	Warm Filter
O	Cool Filter
P	Sepia Filter

The main near term goal for us is to get the base game (without UGC) of about the 3-4 levels to a playable state so we can give it to play testers for feedback. This is where we could really use some helping hands to get development and content done. The progress so far has been slow but steady. We'd like to keep it steady, but speed it up with extra help on both dev and art side, while hopefully also sharing the admin and marketing (fuckingkillme.jpeg) work.

We can’t wait to hear from you, thanks so much for reading!