Attention 2D Artists

Basically, my best friend Charles and I have developed our own universe. It is called A Tempest Season (ATS). We have worked on it for about 12ish years. It started out on paper and then went to a message board, and then to several MUDs. It is now trying to make itself as a 2D game.

This means there is a ton of lore already made and that we have experience in making systems for the players to use, etc.

We also both play MMORPG's so we have an idea of what the players want...and since we are players ourselves, we can relate more to things. I suppose an example would be Vanguard's dev interaction. It'll be something like that.

Our MUD was pretty successful (It was in the late phase of MUDs, so it was really impossible to get a lot of people). Though, with design issues and a bunch of problems, we had to close it down. It's a long story.

I have a degree in Computer Science and Chuck has a degree in English. This means that we make a pretty good pair!

The game will focus on uniqueness, fun and roleplay. We also want to make a lore and dynamic driven game for the players. If we offer something that the major game companies don't, then that gives us an advantage.

Right now, the game is written in Java. I have developed the system from the ground up in the last year. We are going to start closed alpha testing of the initial game framework at the end of this month (July 1st). It is not polished right now obviously. But we'd like to get some testing done and initial feedback from our friends who played ATS the MUD.

So to give a quick run down of what the game can currently do:
You can connect to the server with your client and generate a character.
Then you can connect to a map and kill monsters and walk around, pick up items, equip and unequip items. You can also gain levels.
Talk to other players.
A graphical display, of course with windows that are typical in MMORPG's and receive updates from the server.

So in essence, the fundamentals are there. We just need to do a bit of testing and some polish work as well as get some art going on.

This has been a three person job (the third person is an assistant programmer to me). But I pretty much did all of the programming.

We are going to form a company to oversee this project and to handle the financial aspects. Now this brings me to the next topic: pricing plans. We are not sure because we do not know what the end product will look up. If the game is nice looking, really fun to play, and overall very solid, then we will offer a monthly fee of perhaps 5 dollars, HOWEVER! You can play most of the game for free. You can initially play for free. Think of it like Rune scape. You can play that for free and if you like it, pay some more money.

The pricing is not set in stone by any means. We have just been bouncing ideas off each other and decided to wait until it is getting close to being finalized. We can't expect people to put down money to try a 2D game. We can expect them to try it for free for as long as it takes to convince them that maybe it is worth it.

So there is a short explanation of what we are trying to do. If you have any questions or anything let me know!

James/Dayrinni