3D Artist for Game Dev

3D Artist — Low-Poly Stylized Melee Game (Remote, Contract)

Project: SHIV (working title) — a multiplayer medieval melee game built in Godot, in active development by a solo developer. Third person sword fighting with real physics blocking, dismemberment, throwable everything, fishing, and very in depth 3D combat, all in a low-poly look.

THE ART STYLE (READ THIS FIRST)

SHIV is deliberately low poly. The game renders with cel shading and a screen-space ink outline over every object — like a moving illustration. That means:

• Chunky, readable silhouettes beat detail. A model that looks plain in Blender often looks perfect in-game once the outline and cel bands hit it.
• Flat-painted / hand-painted color, not PBR realism. Simple palettes, clean color blocking, opaque materials. No high-poly bakes, no normal-map detailing. Think Zelda: Wind Waker.
• Poly budgets are low — a weapon is a few dozen to hundreds of tris, not tens of thousands.

If your portfolio has low-poly stylized work you're proud of, that's exactly what I'm hiring for.

WHAT YOU'D MAKE

• Character armor and outfit sets: full-body looks built as separate named pieces on a provided reference body. No rigging, no weight painting ever. The game uses rigid segmented body pieces posed by code; you model the pieces in T-pose on the reference skeleton positions, name them per the guide, and the engine does the rest.
• Textures in a simple vector stylized art style.
• Weapons and tools: swords, hammers, shields, instruments, props.
• Environment design, modeling, and texturing: islands, arenas, buildings, furniture, and set dressing for hand-authored maps. This includes helping design the spaces, not just modeling to spec.
• Occasional creatures/props (we have a swordfish)

TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS

• Strong in Blender (our whole pipeline is Blender -> glTF/GLB -> Godot).
• Comfortable following a written export guide: applied transforms (Ctrl+A -> All Transforms on everything, every time), correct origins, consistent object naming, opaque materials unless transparency is intended. Clean exports are a hard requirement — the game derives colliders, damage zones, and outline behavior from your file as-delivered.
• Texture painting in a simple or cartoon style.
• Able to iterate from screenshots and written feedback, async. Able to join on ---------- calls to discuss.

Not required: animation, rigging, Godot experience, shader work.

WORKING ARRANGEMENT

• Remote, async, flexible hours.
• Ongoing work: the game grows weekly, and every new weapon, outfit, and map needs art.
• You'll get a copy of the export guide and reference files, plus fast feedback — usually same-day.

HOW TO APPLY

Send a portfolio (or a few images) showing low-poly stylized work — characters, weapons, or environments. A sentence about your Blender workflow and your rate expectations helps. Bonus points if you include the lowest-poly thing you've ever been proud of.