Trying something different with development

Rage, one of the enemies in my indevelopment brawler Eternal War. Now fully animated, woo hoo!

We've all been there; we have a great game concept but no matter how talented we are we don't shine in all areas so we try to enlist the help of others. Any game development site dedicated to any specific area has topics (sometimes even entire forum sections) dedicated to people presenting and pleading with others to join up to make their killer MMOFPSRTSSIM.

As soon as the people join up you find yourself almost switching roles from your previous task (either it be programming, art, etc.) to project management. Fighting and trying to get the once excited people who joined your team to do some actual work. I call this the "after honeymoon period".

What I ended up running into was a lot of discussion, which is fine, but not so much when people all agree on design choices and then do nothing production wise to help with them. Eventually due to the lack of progress they all dropped off and it was just myself and our programmer.

I decided from that point to change the development style, I started to contract out art services, paying freelance artists. I wanted something next gen but after almost a year I was finding the costs to be too much on my budget and while the quality was amazing due to the lack of funds I'd end up finishing the game sometime in 2020. I decided to go more previous gen, focusing on interesting character designs and basic diffuse/alpha maps. I see Epic is doing something similar (genre wise) with Shadow Complex, with current gen art, which interests me, I don't regret my choice however and am pleased with the art direction we went with.

Also from that point I decided to do something different with development, with my programmer still volunteering I decided to develop as much of the art as possible without having him involved. My intent was to complete everything; all concept art, all models, all animations, all environments and all sound (I'm having the music keyed off of ingame gameplay experiences however) before the programmer laid down a line of code. At this point I've found that I may have to have a few lines of code laid out so I can work on levels.

It's been an interesting experience, one mainly of patience, as I have my artist team working dedicated on one area at a time. Right now we're on animations, with 137 animations for 13 characters left to go (out of 32 characters) then onto environments. I'll guess I'll see how this development method will pay off when we hit the programming stage, to see how quickly my programmer can put things together and how smooth the process is. I'll of course blog all of those elements when the time comes.