____ Like Animals update: Looking for Artist recommendations.

Hi all,

To keep myself sane from EA's madness I've been putting some time into ____ Like Animals. (For those itching for mod updates I still spend most of my time working on mods, and like an hour or two in the evening working on Like Animals.) Anyways- I'm quite confident in my abilities as a writer, tepidly confident in my abilities as a game dev. I even have a close friend who works for a AAA studio who offered to help me with sound and music. What I am definitely not is a visual artist- and if there's one thing that a dating sim needs it's good, sexy, character portraits (on top of all the other assets of course. I've been doing okay finding stock asset packs for the environments I need, but I think the character art is probably the important visuals in a game like this. I will say my budget is tight (patreon is my sole income, but I also want to invest back into for more than just The Sims), so I can't make promises that I'd be able to definitely commission someone right away, but I'd like to know where to start looking to budgeting and having conversations.

A bit about what I'm envisioning: Obviously the art has gotta be sexy. They're werewolves so obviously furry artists to the front. I'll do a character breakdown soon as a sneakpeak for all paid patrons, but suffice to say it's fairly diverse range of skin colors and body types, so Experience with black and/ or trans characters would be preferable. All of the generals out of the way, this is definitely as much a horror game as much as it is a romance (definitely Interview With a Vampire vibes.) and so I'm more likely to lean toward artists with darker, spookier vibes- something like the character work in Darkest Dungeon.

One last thing I will say is in the microscopic chance this makes any money, I 100% want to include royalties for any artistic contributors to the game (that goes for any really original content i create tbh). Feel free to comment your recs or DM them to me. Also feel free to recommend yourself if you interested as an artist!