Help Wanted: Additional Programmer for Dicey Dungeons

Terry Aug 23, 2018 0 Comments

Applications are now closed. Thank you!

Hello all! I’m looking for a programmer for a new videogame I’ve been working on, Dicey Dungeons. It’s a full or part time position for at least two months, and possibly longer. Ideally, you’d be available to start as soon as possible!

Dicey Dungeons is currently available in early alpha on itch.io, and it’s coming to Steam and Mobile in the next few months – i.e. we’re into the last few months of development. You can get the latest version here, or play some earlier free builds here. (Here’s a great youtube video of the most recent version!)

Dicey Dungeons is a three person project right now – a musician, and artist, and me, on design and programming. For the last six weeks, I’ve spent almost all of my time on programming work, and it’s meant design work has come to a halt. I think that’s been bad for the project, and I want to do something about it!

Dicey Dungeons is created with Haxe, using my own framework, which is an extension on top of OpenFL and HaxeStarling. I’m looking for someone who’s familiar with at least some of that!

• Experience with Haxe is a prerequisite.
• Experience with OpenFL and Starling would help a lot, but isn’t mandatory.
• Experience with Haxegon isn’t expected.

I’m basically looking for someone to tackle the more technically focused programming jobs, so that I can concentrate on the design focused ones. These jobs include:

• Optimisation: reduce draw calls, reduce cpu use, and skip unchanged frames where possible to reduce the system requirements of the game and make it run better across all devices.
• Create a system to automatically create 1080p assets from our 4K assets as needed, and restructure the code so that it can automatically handle different asset resolutions as an in-game setting.
• Expand the audio tech in the game to increase the range of cool things we can do – we’re really interested in exploring dynamic audio – particularly syncing sounds to music, using real-time filters like reverb, and layering tracks.
• Figure out a workflow for getting our After Effect animations working in starling fast and efficiently. Potential solutions range from building our own animation tech, to converting the animations to starling friendly file formats.
• Restructure and simplify the game’s “action” system so that we can implement a minimax AI for the enemies.
• Do the tech side of getting the game working well on mobile devices (which is mostly about reducing texture memory use – carefully unloading and reloading assets as needed). (I’ll be doing the design side – i.e. resolution independence, UI changes)
• Work towards making the game more moddable – this mostly means making it possible to load and unload different mods at runtime and creating a system to support that, refactoring existing systems in the game to make it easier for people to create radically different enemies, equipment and characters, and working with the existing modding community to add stuff they might want!
• Implement platform specific features like cloud saving and achievements for steam, iOS and google play. In particular, I’d really like to add Steam Workshop support.
• Help out with the more technically focused bugs on this public github issues list.

Payment stuff is negotiable! I can probably afford a rate of £25/hour GBP for two months, but I’m up for discussing more for less time depending on your qualifications and experience!

This job is for someone working remotely online – I’m based in London, but it doesn’t matter where you’re based.

If you’re interested, you can apply via this google form! Please fill it in by Monday the 3rd of September.

Thank you!

Help Wanted: Art Director for Dicey Dungeons

Terry May 26, 2018 0 Comments

Applications are now closed. Thank you!

Hello blog readers! Apologies for the boring job post! (If you are not interested in being the new Art Director for Dicey Dungeons, you can stop reading now!)

I am looking for an Art Director for a new videogame I’m working on, Dicey Dungeons. It’s a full time position for 10 weeks, with some part time work requirements afterwards. Ideally, you’d be available to start within the next 3 or 4 weeks!

You can play an early work in progress version of Dicey Dungeons RIGHT NOW – I’ve been releasing early versions of the game as I go. Check it out at https://diceydungeons.com/. (The current version of the game is using my own placeholder art, and is not indicative of how I want the game to eventually look.)

The game’s Art Director would be responsible for every part of how the game looks, from top to bottom, to make the whole thing come together. You’d be working with two other people – me (Design/Programming) and the game’s musician.

For this game, I’m really interested stepping away from the 8-bit styles I’m mostly known for, and I would love to work with an animator. I think Dicey Dungeons would look great with animated cartoon characters!

The majority of the work will be animating enemy characters – however, there is also a lot of world design, UI work and also a small amount of cutscene work!

Things I’m into for this game: Colourful. Cute. Newgrounds. Adventure Time. Cartoon Network. Vectory. Animated. Expressive. Simple. Readable.

Things I’m not into for this game: Detailed. 8-bit. Retro. Pixel Art. Videogame. Noisy.

This might be a good match for you if: your style fits some of the things I’m into above. You’ve got some experience with both character design and animation. You’re happy working remotely. (If you’re around the UK it’d be great to have team meetings in person occasionally, but I don’t have a good space for you to work out of!). You don’t need to have been involved in making a game before, and your standard working hours don’t have to be UK hours, but you do need to be able to work on the game more-or-less full-time.

Here’s the biggest art puzzle in Dicey Dungeons:

The game is really UI heavy. One of the big things the game’s art director is going to need to figure out is how to make this screen look and feel great, because it’s what the game will look like 90% of the time!

I estimate that this job is about 10 weeks of full time work, and then a couple of weeks of part time work. Here’s the actual list of work involved:

– Monster designs and animations (there’s a LOT of this, dozens and dozens. It’s mostly this, tbh)
– Player character designs and animations (there are six of these)
– Overall design, concept work, figuring things out
– Art for equipment
– Art for UI
– Art for combat stage layout
– Art for exploration stage
– Some cutscene stuff
– Meta stuff – icons, store page art, etc

Alright! So, I have a budget of around £10,000 – £12,000 for this project. Over ten weeks and including some part time work after, that works out as a day rate of £200 per day. I would strongly prefer to make this game without the help of a publisher, if I can, so I can’t really go very far outside that budget.

Also: I am very open to having a conversation about revenue shares, and about finding a balance between revenue share and day rate. (I actually really like the idea of revenue sharing, as a way to, you know, stake your claim in the thing, make it something you OWN a bit of, rather than something you’re working on.)

Finally, I’m happy to talk about paying some amount of this upfront, as a way to secure your time and commitment to the project.

(My expectation would be that all work done under these terms would be exclusively for Dicey Dungeons, and not for any other projects or video games.)

If you’re interested, you can apply via this google form! Please fill it in by Monday the 4th of June.

Thank you!

Wanted: Coder for VVVVVV maintenance

Terry Mar 26, 2014 13 Comments

Edit 26th March 2014: I’ve now found somebody for this job. Thank you!

Embedded that video mostly because I just wanted another reason to tell people about that medley. OMG, have you seen it? I know, right?

Heads up, this is a job offer post. If you’re not a coder looking for work, it’s probably going to be very boring oh no

I’m just back from GDC, and made a decision to take some time out of my projects to finish up a couple of small jobs that have been hanging around for way too long. One of those jobs is to finally update VVVVVV, which is currently in need of a patch.

The current steam and humble store version of the game is 2.0, which is the first version of Simon Roth’s C++ port. It’s mostly pretty stable, but it does have some issues – time trial scores aren’t saved, for example, a bunch of other small things like that.

There is a version 2.1, but it’s not live on steam – Simon did some work on the rendering code to make it hardware accelerated, which improves the games performance, but caused it to break for other people. I decided that it wasn’t worth the risk to make that version live and potentially break the game for people who’d not have problems with it before. 2.1 fixes most of the 2.0 bugs, and adds some nice new features (like maps in player levels, coloured text in player levels, and some cool new player levels included by default like Dimension 333333). The 3DS version is essentially 2.1.

There’s also an unreleased version 2.2, which adds joypad support and a few other small things.

I’d like to hire someone for a week or two to finish version 2.2 of the game. If you’re an experienced C++ coder familar with Windows, Mac and Linux, available to start now and interested in working on this, I’d like to hear from you!

A broad overview of what’s involved:
– Get familiar with VVVVVV’s terribly messy code, and clean it up where possible.
– Update the rendering code to make it safe and stable on all platforms.
– Finish implementing the 2.2 patch, which includes a couple of half implemented features and a couple of features still to be implemented that we can talk more about.
– Mac Specific: Ensure that the game works correctly on the latest versions of OSX, and get the game ready to re-submit to the Mac App Store.
– Linux Specific: Ensure that the game runs nicely on the latest multitude of confusing linux systems.
– Steam Specific: Implement steamworks support in the game.
– A few other secret things I don’t want to list here.

An ideal candidate for the job is someone who can be on call from here on out to fix issues that crop up. For example, should a mac update cause the game to suddenly stop working (these things happen, especially on mac), then you should be available to sort it out at your usual hourly rate without too much of a delay.

If this sounds like something you’re interested in, get in touch, and we can discuss rates, deadlines, and more about what’s involved. Thanks!

Wanted: Coder

Terry Apr 12, 2011 0 Comments

I’m no longer looking for any applications – thank you! [13th April 2011]

Hey all! Time for another wanted ad – I’ll keep this one short.

I’m looking for a contract coder to port a new flash game of mine to C++. The job will probably take a couple of weeks. If you’re interested and would like to know more, please send me an email, and we can discuss rates, deadlines, and more about what’s involved.

Ideally, you should:
– Be very familiar with C++ and SDL (or a similar cross platform library)
– Be at least somewhat familiar with ActionScript 3
– Have some experience building binaries in Windows, Mac and Linux.

Thanks!