hello!
I've been working on a game titled Spilled Mushrooms for a few weeks now, and it's really starting to feel more and more complete, but the overall aesthetic feels too unpolished. I'm a software engineer and not an artist, and I think that's shining through a little too strongly in how rigid the art and UI are. I'm looking for someone who can help me add some charm and playfulness to the experience. Beyond that, most of the placeholder art is very sloppy ChatGPT output that's been thresholded and scaled without much manual intervention. Consequently, it's lacking a consistent style, scale, and most importantly, charm.
The overall theme is that the protagonist is tasked with delivering a basket of mushrooms, and, unfortunately, spills them all along the way. The gameplay starts after the spill as a turn-based puzzle card game that sees the player coercing a handful of creatures to collect the lost mushrooms, with each area and critter having a unique set of stats and traits. The rules are pretty simple but yield a surprising amount of depth from time to time. Each puzzle is randomly generated, but guaranteed to be solvable. Most puzzles only take one or two minutes to solve and have many possible solutions, but some are surprisingly difficult and take me a handful of tries to win, with only one or two possible move trees leading to victory.
I've attached a few screenshots for some reference - most of the creature assets end up being around 80x80 or smaller, and the area assets are 128x72. Of course, this is all subject to change if the UI is changed. There are currently about 30 creatures and 15 areas that need art.
This is purely a passion project, as I suspect many Playdate games are, and so I consequently don't have much of a budget to work with here, although I have some flexibility with it.
