Production Pause

Apart from managing the music and art development, this past week has been slow in actual production. My mind has been extremely busy however, due to the biggest problem that indie developers face.

Money. The first lesson anyone should learn about indie game development is, games are expensive. If something is not costing money, then someone is giving up their time for it, and as we all know, time is money. Even if you are a lone wolf, then you need to get your living money from somewhere. One of my goals for this project was to outsource assets, and pay upfront. I wanted to produce a polished and professional game. I didn’t want to make promises about royalties which might not happen, or ask people to do it for free. The short version is that the funding I’d hoped for hasn’t worked out. Aparently people just don’t hand out money anymore.
The second lesson anyone should learn about indie game development is, problems are challenges to be worked around with all your abilities. For me, it’s adaptability with design and business. I can now see why publishers shove buggy, unpolished crap out the door. It all comes down to cash flow. Given that I need cash flow now, have invested a lot of time into this, and have a lot of code and development assets from it, I’ve had to redesign my business plan, and change some design aspects to match. The good news from this is the game will get an even tighter focus, and I have a solid vision for the release state, which will be very close. I plan to go into an open beta stage on July 1. The next few posts will elaborate on my new business plan, my new design and my production and beta scheduling.