[R>Programmer] Paid Wanted: Coder for Monster Rancher Game (CLOSED)

[gruntlord?]

Personal Project
Placeholder Name: Silk Empire
Game Premise: 2D Monster-Rancher Breeding Sim on a Fantasy version of the Earth's historical Silk Road.
Goal: A Two-handed Fantasy-Breeding Menus-Game focused on the stats & genetic lineage of bred monsters.
Developer: I’ll be in charge of oversight, since I’m personally funding this game. A 2D artist would be hired AFTER the core-game is developed.
Purpose: Personal Project, current variety of breeding games don't meet my desire. This path is more costly, but the long term satisfaction will be worth it.

Gameplay:
1: Think of a breeder/rancher living alongside the ancient Silk Road, managing dozens, hundreds, thousands of various livestock, but they're of various monster lineages(and some human dilution).
2: No combat. Just breeding, managing and trading of monsters. Limited ingame economy of trade and meeting contracts.
3: Players can take Breeding Contracts. Satisfying enough of specific contracts grants the Player different types of licenses, allowing more monster diversification.
(Ex1: Oriental Army needs 20 low INT wolfmen with high Attack, bonus if high defense. Genetic variance & tree-diversity not a concern.)
(Ex2: Merchant looking for ONE Cowgirl with high Int, +35% human genetics, and infertility. Must be virgin.)
(Ex3: MC/Player wants to diversify livestock. Can hire someone or their livestock, OR can get free seed from local village/barracks. Results may vary.)
4: Game impact from Customizable MC. At the start, Player gets limited amount of points to spend on MC’s perks. Customization can impact Player's personal gene code. If Player chooses to breed with livestock or stud out to other farms/private requests, offspring can inherit stats&looks. Maybe good short term, but if Player is reckless, its costly in the long-run to their MC's brand image.
5: Player runs a breeding ranch, by selecting and deciding pairings for the next upcoming breeding season. That includes themselves. Impregnation time reveal can vary. Some monsters have requirements/limits/sexual preferences.
(Ex: Jane the cowgirl doesn’t reveal signs of pregnancy until after two weeks. She’s fine with mediocre housing&food, loves breeding with lycans, is okay with being bred up to 5 times during the season, is only willing to breed with no more than 2 different studs in a season, but hates breeding with androgynous OR shorter males. Player need to balance this satisfaction bar, as it affects the conception chance; too low and the monster will REFUSE to breed.)

Visuals: Basic and mostly static. Will all be placeholders. Planned order below.
1: World Map(Background, near end stage of development, can be made interactive).
2: Breeding & management UI that's easy to navigate, but still requires two hands.
3: Genetic-Tree display for whatever monster is selected.
4: Trading Hub for monsters and contracts.
Note: Placeholders images for EVERYTHING else, allowing for a simple swap later on. (Replacing the placeholder images with higher quality images, is one of the main post-release goals.)

Lewdity: Lewd content is currently text descriptions(Ex: Jane has tanned Fcup breasts. She has a small chance of her bad habit occurring, where she orally takes the stud's release. Jane was creampied 5 times by the Stud). Post-release goals would be lewd display images, then basic 2D animation system visualizing the breeding in progress.

Development Status: I’ve been working on and off this for the past few years. Due to irl work requirements, I can’t proceed any further without outsourcing development. As of now, the following has been done.
Writing: 100%(Species, Subspecies, Hybrids, Perks, Locations, Resources, Contracts, blurb for menu navigation, etc.) Please note there is no story.
Genetic Mathematics: 25%. I can’t proceed further until I’ve seen how the coding progress for you goes. Entirely based on how genetic-tree system will end up. I’ll adjust the mathematics based on that. I’m open for insight/advice.
Placeholder Images: 10%(Literally placeholder stick figures).
Audio: 100%(Royalty free background music). While sound effects aren't locked out, they're at the complete bottom of the priority list.

Game Inspirations: Over the past decade, I've seen games that have almost met what I desired, but for various reasons, didn't meet the cut. They are Breeding Season, Portals of Pheron, and several others. If we delve into further discussions, I will point out the exact positive & negative mechanics.

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Job Detail
Looking for coder, in either Godot or Unity. You’ll be making:
1: A 2D menu-based environment & stitching up together all the written content I’ve created.
2: A very flexible genetic-tree system, that can go from smallscale to largescale, easily displaying hundreds of branches in the family tree.
3: An easy “detailed look” system for any monster the Player selects in the genetic-tree display.
4: A interface system to select and pair Monsters/Studs/Dams for breeding. This system should allow for multiple studs to be paired with one dam.
5: Genetic code system containing appearance, stats and perks of each stud/dam.
Note: Most lewd-games/mods only display immediate parents, and don’t even display tags like cousins, half-siblings, 3rd aunt etc. Your system is going to need to account for MANY types of relations.

I'll be paying you for additional tasks, but these five are the top priority. If you can't tackle these five, then you won't qualify.

Employment Type:
This will be paid work. AFTER the core concept of the game is completed, the game might be uploaded for free with an optional donation-tab attached. Any donations would be 80/20 split, 80 funding the post-release content and 20 for recovering development costs. IF development costs are fully recovered, donations would be 100% directed into post-release content. If all post-content goals were realized, donations will be shut down. I don't have plans for a sequel. If somehow, by magic, this game sees massive success, I will give blessings for someone else to make a sequel, and they will not be obligated to give me revenue/royalties. Feel free to quote me on this.

Work commitment:
1-2 years MAX for a single game project. Depending on costs & method of payment, payment would be monthly or every second month.

Preferred method of contact:
After a few rounds of satisfying discussions on F95, we’ll move the discussion to Discord. Due to irl work, on weekdays I’m only available online for an hour or two. Yeah, now you know WHY I’m outsourcing.

Application Requirements: If you're still interested, you must meet the following below.
1: Have an average proficiency in English.
2: Basic awareness of the genetic stat-inheritance & family-tree as game mechanics. Ex: Crusader Kings, Rimworld+mods, Massive Chalice, & Niche.
3: Basic awareness of the earlier listed “Game Inspirations”.
4: An example or two of a build/project you worked on. Doesn’t matter if it did/didn’t see commercial release.
5: Why you think Godot/Unity would be the superior engine option for developing this game. I’m not the one coding this after all. If you INSIST on sending me a 12-page essay, make sure you do basic spellcheck and grammar. I’m not your professor.

Application Duration
Applications will no longer be accepted after October 13th. If I haven't responded to you by October 20th, then...assume that time-traveling cyberpunks took me out. Hopefully it was nonlethal!

Additional comments: The questions below aren't required, but would go a LONG way if answered.
1: What difficulties do you possibly foresee working on this project?
2: What your requirements from me would be?
3: How would you handle futanaris in the genetic-tree system?

 

[gruntlord?]

Please note your build/project needs to playable. Screencaps won't cut it...

 

[gruntlord?]

I've started to receive similar questions, so I'll place answers to them below. (This might get updated).

1. "Why do you want this game?"
I enjoy spreadsheet games, adding lewd mods to those games, and playing lewd games with the premise of "breeding".
Sadly, the countless breeding games I've seen over the years HEAVILY NEGLECT the spreadsheet part. If you look up ANY IRL breeding program, you'll find that there's LOTS of paperwork. VERY detailed focus on the family trees. Also, spreedsheet games are almost ALWAYS E-rated, with modding not always being reliable. Most Funders are only interested in the lewd part of the breeding games. So, instead of crossing my fingers for a decent dev, I've decided to take action.

2. "Why aren't you releasing this on Steam?"
Publishing on Steam means dealing with the public. It's the same reason why I'm not interested in a Patreon or similar.

3. "Why aren't you doing a Patreon/ETC?"
That would mean content development be at the behest & control of any Funders & Patreon/ETC content-regulators. I want the core concept to be realized first, without any distractions. Funders could derail development by making ridicilous demands(Ex: 250 people could vote for a cat-waifu NTR story with 50 animated scenes be the sole focus on for the next year). A content-regulator could take one look at the game and screech "OH NO Alabama-simulator!"(Crossing of family trees is VERY common in irl breeding programs). So, I'll be funding this out of my own pocket.

4. "When do you want to upload the build and activate donations?"
Honestly, if we do upload, it'd be with the 1.0.0 build, which would be based on the fully functional 100% completion of the "Job Detail". Donation-tab would be activated at the same time.

5. "How are you paying me?"
My past experience solely comes from hiring concept artists and modders. So, I’d REALLY like to use the current system I've used with them. That is, have a total price, and break the payment into milestones. For example:

Client: “Here’s what I want in entirety for X-Thing.”
Contractor: “I estimate 5 weeks for X-Thing. I will charge you $3,000.”
Client: “Okay X-thing can be broken down into Milestone 1, 2 and 3. What is the workload timeline?”
Contractor: “In matter of workload time, I estimate 1 week, 3 weeks, 1 week.”
Client: “So how does, $600, $1,800, and $600 sound? I’ll give 20% for starting each milestone, and 80% upon completion? That’s $120, $360, and $120 to start. Then $480, $1,440, and $480 upon completion for each milestone.”
Contractor: “Can we adjust for...."

Obviously this would be WAY more hashed out and discussed on Discord. The above was merely an example. You’re the coder, so you should be able to guess the workload and timeline for each milestone. Like say, "X-to-Y weeks for the trading hub…..X-Y weeks to stitch all the core-gameplay together, X-Y weeks for bug fixing, etc...". This would be hashed out so that no unrealistic deadlines are enforced and payment is balanced.

6. "What's the budget?"
It depends on what currency you want to be paid in, and on what platform. Budget & payment periods would obviously be impacted by that, due to possible currency exchange-rates and platform fees. Another factor is how many "milestone" stages I'd be paying you for, aka how often you get paid. All three factors would be a big impact on how long I'd be able to hire you for.

7. "This game of yours doesn't sound very low-end rig friendly..."
It's not supposed to be for low-end rigs or mobile. For all those future people that will be upset that the FREE game won't work with their 960....you gotta upgrade someday. There's a million tech-vids out there on affordable methods to upgrade your rig.

8. "Why can't you post the entire job-list?"
If you can't bother to meet the "Application Requirements", then I'm not obligated to reveal more about the job. What I've already posted is the main ghist of what I'll be hiring a coder for. Just with more game-content stuff etc.

9. "Unity sucks, why not use another engine?"
Then go ahead and type up your essay on why you feel your proposed option is superior, and sent it alongside your application. Make sure it's a really good argument aside from "I like it lol."

10. "Wait, is this 2D game supposed to have moving sprites or not?"
No, there is to be no moving of any Sprites. It's a game that will primarily be menu-based, similar to something like Crusader Kings.

 

[gruntlord?]

We're now 13-ish days from the Oct.13th deadline. There's still time to apply.

For those that feel nervous or discouraged about applying, remember: Every shot you don't take, you ALWAYS miss.

...and with every shot you take, you gain more experience.

*Time Edit*

 

[Aclacs]

Hey, I hope this message finds you well. I apologize for any inconvenience, but I wanted to inquire if you are still considering commissioning someone
Are you on discord for better communication Mine: aclacs_12

 

[gruntlord?]

I wanted to inquire if you are still considering commissioning someone

Hello Aclacs!

Deadline for those applying is Oct.13th. Applicants have 14-ish days left to apply.
Deadline for me to decide, is October 20th. That gives me a week AFTER the application deadline to make a decision.

If you want to apply, please contact me by means of the f95 conversation method, and be able to meet the "Application Requirements".

If the discussion is civil and shows promise, I'll then move it to Discord.

 

[gruntlord?]

Gentle reminder that about 1 week remains. After that date, applications will no longer be accepted.