Another month *eek* where does the time fly to, anyway trying to get work done on PipeDreams whilst holding down a full-time job and being a husband and father is almost a full-time job in itself.
I'd decided on setting a deadline for the end of May to have a finished PC version ready to roll, followed by the Pocket PC version 4-6 weeks later (there maybe a J2ME version in the works as well - I'll let you know about that one later).
Anyway - the deadline is fast approaching but I'm confident I can make it, especially since I've discovered that from about 6am till 7am (before everyone else get's up) is the most productive time of the day - trying to fit dev time in at work is a no-no and the evening's get taken up by the usual mundane house things and the biggest evil of all TV (don't get me started on that one), so having followed an old artist friends advice, it's with the larks every morning - I guess there's something in that "early to bed, early to rise" adage after all...
As I may have mentioned before, I write code for a living (my drawing abilty is non-existent), so getting the graphics to look good has been one of the most difficult things to get right.
To get round this problem I decided to take a novel approach, any startup developers may also want to try this...
If you are an indie developer or take an interest in how video games are made you'll have probably come across a few forums, taking the bull by the horns I went round all the indie / game dev forums I could find (most have dedicated sections devoted to for looking for art resources) and posted a message asking for help.
Because I'm self-funding my own time (ie making the game for nothing), I don't have the money to shell out for resources in advance, so what I did was make a promise - I offered a generous share of any net profits on a royalty basis and more importantly I offered full credits and a letter of reference atesting to the quality and reliability of the artist - a lot of actors start out doing work for nothing, just so they can build up a portfolio, it's generally a win-win scenario for the producer and the actor. I've had some favorable responses so far so hopefully this strategy will work out as a win-win for me too.
The more polished the overall product is the better chance of it being a commerical success (it won't take many sales to recoup development costs *grin*) and the more chance the artist will make some cash, either way - I get my art and they get to add to their portfolio, top idea all round I think...
Lastly - I've decided to hide a few unlockables / easter egg's / secrets / what-have-you in the game, a couple of them I'll only release info about here, so if anybody (hello out there) is reading this then you'll get the scoop on the rest of the world... If there is anybody reading this, drop a comment to say hi
Jon....
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