Visual Artist / Creative Director — Toy Quest
We’re Chaotic Great Games. We made Gudnak, a tactical card game with a cult following and art people actually frame. Now we’re making something new.
Toy Quest is a tabletop skirmish game for kids 10+ (and the adults who played with them). Players bring their own toys — stuffed animals, action figures, die-cast cars, LEGO minifigs, plastic ponies — and field them as warbands on a rug battlefield. Each toy gets assigned traits that determine which cards it can play and which factions it fits.
The tone is nostalgic, bittersweet, and warm-hearted, with edges. This is not a “cute for kids” game. It is a game about toys as they actually exist: loved, lost, found again, handed down, stitched up, left on the shelf. A teddy bear with one eye missing is not sad — he has been through things. A princess doll’s plastic crown is not fragile — it has been declared royal three thousand times.
We are looking for a contract visual artist and creative director to define the visual identity of this game from the ground up.
The most important thing you will draw
The game’s signature card type is the Memory — cards that depict the moment a kid played with a toy. Memories are not pictures of the toys themselves. They are pictures of the play: a child’s hand on a stuffed animal, two kids whispering after lights-out, a yard sale at dusk, an attic shaft of light catching dust. The toy is in the frame, but the kid and the moment are the subject.
These are the cards we want people to fall in love with.
Visual touchstones
- Toy Story (Pixar) — the secret-life-of-toys emotional grounding
- Calvin and Hobbes — the imagination-as-reality framing, where the toy is what the kid believes it is
- The Velveteen Rabbit — the “loved into being real” sentiment
- Studio Ghibli (Spirited Away, Howl’s) — texture, warmth, weight of objects
- The Goonies / Stranger Things — kid-on-an-adventure energy
- A bedroom floor at golden hour — the lighting reference
The five factions
- Kayleans — Plush, princesses, ponies. Pink bedroom on a Saturday morning. Joyful, glittery, friendship as power.
- Clickbricks — LEGO, K’Nex, Playmobil. The basement floor. Engineering, combination, modular play.
- The Chosen — The cool toy on the high shelf. Vader, the dragon, the action figure with edges. Tween posturing, the toy you were not allowed to touch.
- Driftwake — Yard-sale survivors. The plush you found at Goodwill. Patched, stitched, weathered. Loved by someone you will never meet.
- Atticians — Heirloom toys. Porcelain dolls, tin soldiers, music boxes. Slow magic, old stories, watched generations come and go.
The world
The rug battlefield should feel like an actual rug — patterned, textured, lived-on. Terrain is pillow forts, book stacks, shoe boxes, blankets. Imagination Objects are crumpled paper, juice boxes, plastic dinosaurs scattered around.
What we are going for
- Toys rendered with the gravity a kid gives them — these are heroes, this is real
- The kid’s imagination overlaid on the toy: the plush bear has the posture of a knight, the action figure has the aura of a dark lord, even though they are still recognizably toys
- Soft, painterly, hand-touched. Texture matters. Stitching, scuffs, paint chips, sun-faded plastic.
- Warm color palettes that lean into nostalgia. Saturated but not garish.
What we are NOT going for
- Generic fantasy art style
- Saccharine “for children” cuteness without weight
- Photorealistic toys (defeats the imagination layer)
- Grimdark or edgy-for-edgy’s-sake
- AI-generated look
What you will do
- Define the complete visual identity for Toy Quest — card frames, faction aesthetics, Memory card style, battlefield feel
- Create key art for each of the five factions
- Illustrate Memory cards that make adults cry in a good way
- Design the card layout and typography system
- Establish a style guide that other artists can follow as the game scales
- Collaborate directly with the game designer on how art serves gameplay
What we are looking for
- A portfolio that shows emotional range — you can do warmth and you can do weight
- Experience illustrating for games, children’s books, animation, or editorial — something where story and image work together
- Strong sense of color, light, and texture. We want to feel the stitching.
- Ability to work in a painterly, hand-touched style (digital is fine, the look is what matters)
- Comfortable taking creative direction and giving it — this is a partnership
- Understanding of how card game art works at small scale — readability, composition, focal point
- Bonus: experience with tabletop game art specifically
- Bonus: you played with toys as a kid and you remember what it felt like
Compensation
Contract, scoped per deliverable. We pay fairly and on time. Rate depends on scope and experience — tell us what you charge and we will figure it out together. This is a ground-floor creative role on a new game from a studio that treats its artists well (ask Bonedust).
To apply
Email tim@chaoticgreat.games with:
- Your portfolio (link or PDF)
- A sentence or two about which faction you would draw first and why
- Your favorite toy growing up. Not the coolest one. The one you actually loved.