Video Game Case/Cartridge Art for a simulation video game

About the project LGS Simulator is a shop-management game about running a game and trading-card store: buying, grading, pricing and reselling collectibles. It's built in Unreal Engine 5.6. The game has its own invented console history — fifteen original consoles across five hardware generations, from a 1978-style wood-and-switches home unit through to a modern slim wedge. None of them are real hardware and none of them carry real branding. Every one is modelled and in the engine already. What's missing is the software. A shelf full of games is what makes a game store feel like a game store, and right now those shelves are empty. This job is to create the packaging artwork for that catalogue: a platform identity for each console, and game covers built on top of it. Assets already exist for game cases and cartridges - this job is solely about the art work. The work is highly visible — box art is what the player looks at on every shelf, in every trade-in, and in the store's inventory screens. It's also a fun brief: you're inventing what the boxes for a parallel-universe console history would have looked like. The core idea: banner first, covers second Every real platform has a consistent strip that appears on every game for it — the blue PlayStation banner across the top, the green Xbox band, the black Nintendo header on an NES box. That strip is what tells you at a glance which system a game belongs to. The first half of this job is designing that banner for each console. Logo, colour, type, proportion, era-appropriate print feel. The second half is producing game covers that sit underneath it, so a shelf of, say, MERIDIAN games instantly reads as MERIDIAN games. The banner is designed once per console and reused on every cover for that console. It should be delivered as its own file as well as baked into the covers, because the engine will keep using it. Some consoles will have banners that go on a cartridge, some will have a wraparound cover art that goes on a disc case. The consoles, and what each one's games are printed on Reference renders of every console will be supplied. This table is the design brief in summary form. Case consoles — full printed wrap (back + spine + front) AURORA DISC: Retro, mid-90s, First-gen optical, 32-bit era; grey/dark plastic, early CD-ROM confidence MERIDIAN: Early 2000s, Sixth generation, black-box era PERIGEE: Early 2000s Sixth generation, enthusiast/arcade-leaning ONYX ARC: Last-gen, late 2000s Glossy HD era VECTOR S: Last-gen, late 2000s HD era, bolder and more graphic than ONYX ARC NEXUS: Modern Current-flagship; minimal, high-contrast MIRROR SLATE: Last-gen handheld Small optical format; smaller case, own canvas size Cartridge consoles — printed label only ASTROVOX VX: Vintage, late 70s / early 80s, Vintage home cart, 118 × 82 mm KORI HOME SYSTEM: Vintage, early 80s Vintage home cart (shared), 118 × 82 mm ANVIL X: Retro, 16-bit ANVIL X home cart, 170 × 55 mm POCKET SLATE: Retro handheld, Chunky handheld cart, 47 × 40 mm VIVID POCKET: Early 2000s handheld, Sleek handheld cart , 50 × 30 mm ASTROVOX VX and KORI share a cartridge shell, so they share the label dimensions — but they get separate banners, because they're competing platforms. No physical media — not in this job CHRONO-POCKET (games are built into the hardware), HORIZON CLOUD (streaming, no drive), FORGE GO (digital only). These three platforms have no boxed games by design. Scope & deliverables Stage 1 — platform banners Platform banner, one per console, delivered as a standalone file Banners are approved before any cover work starts. Getting these right is a big part of the job. Stage 2 — the catalogue Complete game cover, ten per console (pending bids, may go more or less), each using that console's banner Front-only crop of each case cover, for the in-game UI Layered source files for everything delivered Ten covers per console is the target. The final count may go up or down depending on quotes and how the first console lands — so please quote a per-cover rate as well as a total, and say whether your rate changes with volume. Titles and item IDs are completely up to you. I do not have the creativity to come up with game names :) Just try to make them sound real, and mirror the real life history of gaming withtout running into any copyright or trademark risks. These are real catalogue entries that ship in the game, not mockups. Technical acceptance criteria These are engine requirements, not preferences. The six standard-case consoles share one pair of canvases. The full wrap is 1536 x 1032 px, which represents a printed area of 284 x 191 mm across back, spine and front. The front-only crop taken from that same artwork is 512 x 720 px, representing the 136 x 191 mm front face on its own. MIRROR SLATE uses a smaller case and therefore its own pair. Its full wrap is 1340 x 1040 px for a 216 x 168 mm printed area, and its front-only crop is 512 x 828 px for a 105 x 170 mm face. The five cartridge consoles have no wrap and no crop, just a single printed label each, and the label size depends on which cartridge that console takes. ASTROVOX VX and KORI both use the vintage home cartridge, whose label is 1024 x 712 px for a physical 118 x 82 mm. ANVIL X uses its own larger home cartridge, a wide letterbox label at 1024 x 332 px for 170 x 55 mm. POCKET SLATE uses the chunky handheld cartridge at 512 x 436 px for 47 x 40 mm, and VIVID POCKET uses the slimmer sleek cartridge at 512 x 308 px for 50 x 30 mm. The two cartridge labels for the handhelds are small on purpose. They are physically small objects and the label is the only printed surface they have, so legibility at that size is the whole challenge. Both dimensions of every file must be divisible by 4. This is non-negotiable: Unreal silently falls back to uncompressed textures when they aren't, which costs roughly twenty times the memory per image. Do not round sizes to "nicer" numbers. The disc wrap One single image containing back, spine and front, exactly like a retail insert. Two template files are supplied, one per case size, each marking the back / spine / front boundaries and the safe area: StandardCase_Wrap_Guide_1536x1032.png the 6 disc consoles MiniDiscCase_Wrap_Guide_1340x1040.png MIRROR SLATE ⚠ Use the pixel bands on the template. Do not calculate the panel widths from the case dimensions — they come from the model's UV layout, which is not evenly divided and is not proportional to the physical case. On the standard case the spine occupies 3.8 % of the canvas where the real case's spine is 4.6 % of its wrap, so anything laid out by proportion will be wrong. On the mini case the print curves around the two spine corners, making the strip wider than back + spine + front measured flat. The grey margins and the gaps between panels on the standard template are UV padding. Nothing there is ever visible — bleed your art through them rather than leaving them empty. The spine is part of your image, so spine text is your responsibility. Take it seriously — cases are shelved spine-out, so the spine is the face the player looks at most of the time. On the mini case the flat spine is only 9 mm (56 px of the 1340) between the two corner curves. The front-only crop is a separate export from the same artwork, at 512 × 720. Format and delivery Flattened PNG, 8-bit, sRGB, no alpha channel (covers are fully opaque). Layered source for every asset (PSD, or Clip Studio / Krita / Affinity native). Banners additionally delivered standalone as PNG with transparency, at the full width of the canvas they sit on. Legibility Covers are viewed on a shelf, often at around 100–150 pixels tall, and frequently two-deep behind each other. The title must be readable at that size. Small print, thin type and low-contrast lettering disappear. Design the front face to survive being shrunk to a thumbnail; put the detail work in the back and spine where the player sees it up close. Originality and rights All artwork must be original. No real console logos, no real publisher or platform marks, no real game titles, no traced or repainted existing box art, no stock photography of real people. The era references above are about graphic design language — print stock, colour, typography, layout conventions of the period — not about copying specific boxes. Full commercial rights are assigned to Wild Peanut LLC on payment, including the right to use the work in the game, on the Steam page, and in marketing. No budget is posted on this job on purpose. Bid what the work is worth to you - please include a price for a few test runs before the whole job and a quote for the entire job. Also open to decreasing scope to 5 games per console, please include a quote for that as well. A well-reasoned higher bid with the portfolio to back it will be taken as seriously as a low one.