Hi Joshua,

Thanks for reaching out. We are developing the game in Unreal Engine with the use of blueprints.

As I mentioned we are a team of three:

Producer/PM (around 9 years of professional experience in industry, worked on publishing of games in Russia for Warner Bros. and Ubisoft) for this project also handling Blueprint programmer responsibilities
Art-director (worked as a Lead Environment Artist for https://sf.my.com/gb, currently concept artist for Riot games - https://www.artstation.com/niconoff)
Game-designer (works as Game-designer/PM for Battlestage Games on https://www.escapefromtarkov.com/)

We initially started the project about 4 month ago and had a C++ programmer on board, but unfortunately it never worked out with him - basically though he was a great guy, his schedule was really full and he could hardly do any work.

Right now we are about 1,5 month of development in Blueprints and we've already done more in Blueprints than in C++.

Currently the game looks like this: https://gyazo.com/c5c1f43a565e6f2a3471d99feb7cc281

We have basic setup there and working on fleshing out battle-session. It is heavily inspired by Darkest Dungeon and gameplay-wise is quite similar with couple of twist:

We are playing with number of characters under you control
We want to have combo abilities that would work if you have particular characters in your party

Meta-game will a little bit different (think mixing Darkest Dungeon with Massive Chalice), but we are not focusing on it that much right now.

Strategy-wise we have quite a clear plan:

First we will build battle session proof-of-concept and apply for Unreal Engine Dev grants - I know a guy in Epics responsible for decision-making regarding Dev grants, he has seen our concepts and says that if we deliver what we promise chances are very high.
After that we will either work to Early Access version for Steam based of Dev grant, or if required will go for some additional funding (I have couple of publishers and investors interested on idea level)
After release on PC we will add versions for mobile and consol market.

Regarding possible timeframes - we should be ready for Dev grant appliance in late January/early February, after that depending on Dev grant sum we will be able to plan our development roadmap, but it will probably be around 9-12 month before we are ready for launch.

Right now we are looking for a really solid professional animator who will be able to go on par with our Art director and keep visuals at really high level. This is a commercial project, so we are not just doing it for fun, meaning that there will be quite hard requirements on quality of work and we will be pushing on time frames (at the same time obviously everyone understands that while we don't have funding we are working when we are free). Compensation-wise every participant will get a share of the project revenue, regarding exact percent - we are not discussing it right now, cuz it will depend on many factors (e.g. how many participants, investors, amount of work of a participant), but as a general rule we will have two parts of each participant share, the first one that is just fixed and the second one is in project "bank", meaning that it is used for costs and allocation based on team decisions.

Do you think you can share your portfolio via e-mail (you can reach me here fdather at gmail.com) or link?

Also will you be up to do a quick test run? Obviously depending on your portfolio - if you have exactly what we need, we won't ask for a test, but if for example you've worked previously mostly with casual/cartoonish projects we will need to make sure you will be able to handle it what we need.