[Mappers][XP] Join the Khelnia Project !

Hello everyone !

I'm here in the name of Khelnia's team to propose anyone who can create maps on RPG Maker XP to work with us on our game.

First question you might ask is : What the hell is Khelnia ??!
Technically, it's nothing yet, but it will be a brower RPG which blend Pokemon combat-system, an elaborate mythological background full of political knots, mysterious events, and difficult choices between different paths, of which none looks easier nor more moral than the others.

Here are a few screenshots from the game :
'Title screen'
'Looking at my monster'
'During a Fight'
'Talking to a NPC'

You can also have a look at this video which show you a relatively old version of the game, but still it shows the basic things you might wanna know about it. '

Our team is composed of relatively experienced members : our main programmer has created websites such as www.hokiseki.fr, which gathered a 1500+ members community in France. He's also designed websites for companies and made money out of it, so he's what I'd call a very skillful programmer (I can send you screens and links if you want to know more about it). Our team also includes one graphic designer, whose work looks great to me, as you can gather from the screens, one writer/game designer (it's me !), and a few RPG-lovers who helped us create a solid game-system, and added the usual contents (creatures, attacks, figures..).

Therefore, the game development is quite far : the game development is advanced, and we reckon we'll be ready to release a beta version in a few months. But there's something which prevent the game from being playable : maps !
A whole scenario is written, we've got friends in radios and web-based communities to promote the game, so we've got a very big and ambitious project going on, but these damn maps are still needed so that we can release a beta version (which will only display the first of four chapters).

Of course, we had a mapper who was supposed to produce these maps (really ? :huh:), but he wasn't involved enough, and he did only a third of what we asked him to do. Moreover, half of his production didn't fit at all with our descriptions. Last but not least, he doesn't answer our mails or phone calls anymore. Therefore, to avoid being the next victims of the 90-90 rule, we decided to try our luck overseas, and here I am to try to hire mappers which could design maps of cities and dungeons. We're taking anyone who's willing to help : as soon as you're ready to map at least one town and one dungeon, you may interest us. In this cas, you can either reply this topic, send me a message via this forum or my e-mail adress (see at the end of this message).

Of course, as I'm a newcomer here, and as this project is totally unknown to you, you may doubt it is serious enough to deserve your attention and your help. As the demo version which we currently work on isn't online yet (we work on a Hamachi network),  I can only provide you here with screenshots and videos (which do NOT show the game how it will be when finished, only a temporary version !). But if you're interested in helping us, or just curious about our work, just PM me and I'll give you access to our Hamachi network so that you can see by yourself where we are.

Even if this project is still unkwown here, I think you may be rewarded for helping us in different manners : first of all, we'd be happy to promote your work by displaying ads for your website (or deviant art link), and quote your name/pseudo in the ending credits. Even if the game is currently 100% french, one of our goals is to fully translate it in english so that we can release it on a global scale within a year.
Moreover, we're ready to remunerate your work. As this is an amateur project, we can't afford paying a mapper for a daily job. Still, if you provide us with a full map for one town and its dungeon, and if it satisfies our request, we're ready to reward you. The amount of money per map is still to be negociated, but I think something around 5$ a town and its dungeon is within our means.

What might interest you I think is that the project is far enough not to ask you a huge amount of work (we don't ask you to help us creating a game from scratch), but still there's a big place for your personal style and your imagination : there's no general design you'll have to follow, you just have to be coherent with the scenario. We'd be even more pleased if you let an unique style to the town you mapped for us !

There's one last question you might ask now :
"Why don't you do it yourself, noob ?!"

First of all, I'm not an accustomed user of the XP version (I work rather on 2k or 2k3). And I definitely can't learn it by now, as writing the story of the game and helping the game design takes me a lot of time. The only one in our team who can do cool stuff on this soft is the main programmer, and he really doesn't have the time to do some mapping, as coding and managing the team already eats all his leisure time (at least, most of it !). We need maps which aren't like the basic stuff anyone can design after a couple of hours on RMN, that's why none of us can do it.

"Then why don't you switch to RPGMaker 2k ?!"

 Well, the answer is quite simple : we had a mapper who worked on the XP version, and most of the code we already wrote is adapted to that version (insofar as our programs take the maps to put them in another format, well it's quite technic and I won't get into details here !). So we would have to give up days of coding if we switched to another version. That's why we try desperately to hire mappers on XP !

As you may have seen, it's quite an ambitious project, which has been running for around a year. Our team is relatively small, but we're all fond of video games, and into this project. We're not gonna give up for any reason, and what we're producing is I think a quality game, so please give my request a thought, I truly think it deserves it.

I think I'm done here, just one last thing : please accept my apologies for the remaining grammatical errors, I'm trying my best, but english is only my second language !

You can reply this offer to the following adress : n-michel (at) hotmail (dot) com
Thanks for reading, hope you are interested !

The K.