Meg Maloney, our Lead Story Writer is looking for some additional team members.  There's lots to be written still in terms of history, lore, quests, and NPC dialog.  She posted this on the forums but I wanted to post it here as well. 

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I'm currently looking for dedicated writers interested in joining our team. If you would like to lend your talent to our project, please read the requirements below and submit your application as directed.

Step one: Briefly familiarize yourself with the 3 possible backstories located in the Backstory & Lore forum. (Entitled "Russ' Backstory, Aaron's Backstory, and Meg's Backstory, respectively).

Step two: Develop a piece which includes some ORIGINAL lore for 1 place of interest within in the game world, 1 person of interest who influences the game world, and 1 item of interest located somewhere inside the game world. They do not all need to be related to one another (for example you may write about a small frontier town, a Cleric of note, and an item of power held by the Sorcerers) nor do they need to be epic in nature (feel free to write about a locally famous inventor) but they do need to exhibit your talent and familiarity with the world being developed. By "original" I mean developed entirely by you - please do not write about places, items or people already described in any of the backstories.

Step three: Submit your piece (maximum of 1500 words-- but we're looking for quality over quantity) in the stickied Submissions thread located in the Backstory & Lore forum. Do not reply to the Help Wanted thread with your submission. Do not create a new thread for your submission.

Step three: please remain active on the forums and/or IRC for one week following your submission. We need to be assured that you will be available and willing to develop adequate time to the project. We're not expecting 40 hours a week, but an average of 2-3 hours per day will probably be necessary (it's fine if you only want to do weekends). Any availability between the hours of 11am - 11pm EST is preferred -- since this is generally when I am active and able to work with you.

Credit will be given for any contributions used, and your contact information will be made available both here on the website as well as within Jeromy's book, Programming an MMORPG in C# with XNA, as a form of free advertising for your talent.

I realize this may sound like a lot, especially for a volunteer project. I'm doing this for free because I truly love to write, and I'm getting great experience and enjoyment from this project. If you think you will too, please consider coming aboard!

Here's some artwork from Tang Chan showing early ideas for two of our classes. The first is our Cleric, a ranged offensive and healing class who uses spoken language to invoke divine wrath.

The second is our Sorceress. She uses the blood of ancients to tattoo glyphs of the divine language onto her person and then uses them as a twisted version of the Cleric's spells. She's a melee caster that uses debuffs and DoT spells to bring the pain.

We are looking for concept artists to work on visuals for Level-Grind Online. Any artist who contributes concept art for the book and demo will have their names, portfolio, and contact information provided inside the book as a form of advertisement for their services.

In specific, I am looking for concept art of the various classes, races, locales, temples, crypts, dungeons, armor, weapons, buildings, cities, and other places of interest contained within the world being built as a companion to the accompanying book.

So if you're a creative artist looking to provide artwork for a wide circulation, and are interested in being involved in the development of a community project, please use the Contact Form above or come to the Forums and post your information.

With the community website up I'm in need of a good web design!  I am looking for a graphic artist and/or web designer interested in joining the team to define the look and feel for the website, logo, and forums. 

While I cannot pay you, credit will be given for the site design, etc...and your contact information will be made available both here on the website as well as within my book (if interested), as a form of free advertising for a *hopefully* brilliant site design.

All artwork for the website should be provided in Photoshop CS3/4 .PSD files with layers intact.

Additional artwork required for theming of the forums should be provided as PNG's or .PSD files.

If anyone is interested in putting a comp together, I'm looking at possibly a medieval copper/bronze theme. Colors, borders, etc. should resemble an old medieval style blacksmith with warm browns and coppers rather than black.

For logo design, I'm considering something like "Level-Grind Online" as two rows, with the "Online" offset to the right and the 'O' represented as a medieval copper cog.  These are just ideas.  If you've got a good site design in mind I'm fine with that too.

Anyone interested should use the Contact Form in order to send me a link to your portfolio.

Cheers!

Welcome All!

Level-Grind online is a 3D open-source, "Sword & Sorcery" style MMORPG being developed in combination with the book Programming an MMORPG in C# with XNA. It has been in development for approximately 6 months, and aims to accommodate many of the same features present in modern MMORPG's. This is being done in an attempt to demonstrate the process of developing a complete MMO using contemporary languages and tools.  

Among the planned and available features are:

• Chat Channels
• Classes
• Special Abilities
• Tech Trees
• Skills
• Races
• Combat System
• Trade
  
• Professions & Crafting
• Equipable Items
• Inventory
• Banks
• Auction House
• Instanced Dungeons
• Arenas
• Dueling

Technology:
Client Platform(s): Windows XP/Vista
Server Platform(s): Windows XP/Vista/Server

Client/Server development will be done using Visual C# 2008 Express Edition/XNA Game Studio 3.0
Client Input, Audio, and Graphics: XNA 3.0
Networking: Custom message protocol delivered over UDP via the Lidgren Networking Library.
Database/FileIO: SQL Server 2008 Express Edition
Scripting: Run-Time bound C# using .NET 3.5 CodeDOM & Reflection

Current Team Members & Responsibilities:
Jeromy Walsh - Lead Programmer & Producer. Jeromy has been a hobby game programmer for almost 15 years now and an industry professional for almost 8. He's got credits on 4 published titles including games from Vivendi, Atari, and Lucas Arts. In addition to his game programming experience he is currently acting as the President of a software company.

Bryan Roessel - Lead Designer (Gameplay Mechanics). Bryan is a science teacher with an undergraduate degree in physics who's life-long passion for games had him writing text-based RPG's and board games as early as the 5th grade. As technology advanced, Bryan joined the modding community making maps for StarCraft and other games. By his high school years he was no longer satisfied with the constraints of other games and took a course in C++ programming which allowed him to build his own 2D tile-based RPG. Bryan and his friends then moved on to make elaborate implementations of games such as Risk and Puerto Rico; adding exploration, combat, and unique game mechanics. Since then, Bryan's been teaching himself PHP, hacking together web-based multi-user environments.

Meg Maloney - Lead Designer (Story). Meg is an experienced writer and an avid gamer. She has been DMing tabletop RPG games since she was introduced to them as a teenager. She has won several awards for her writing, including the Level I Gold award for Poetry from the National Foundation for the Arts in 2003. In addition to her current work for Level-Grind Online, Meg is also assisting team member Bryan Roessel with his current browser-based game project.

Cameron Degraw - Gameplay Designer. Cameron has been an avid, life-long gamer since his early childhood. He has spent countless hours both playing and modifying games. While he's a fan of nearly every genre his past experience is in modding and scripting Half-Life, Starcraft, and various RPG's. He has spent his free time over the last few years working as a game designer on various community projects.

Previous Work by Team Members:
Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonshard, 2005 Atari, Inc
Mercenaries, 2005 Lucas Arts
Star Wars Battlefront, 2004 Lucas Arts
Lord of The Rings: War of the Ring, 2003 Sierra Entertainment