Looking forward for updates. What is your plan for kickstarter? I read crowd funding has been tough these days.
I really appreciate the well thought out posts and background on your inspiration and process. As someone who isn't a dev, it feels like a behind the scenes look into a world I've always dreamed about. I'm also an EE with a bit of coding experience - I'm interested in what led you to split away from your main field/day job and start developing full time. Also, how did your experience as an EE help (or hinder) you on your path to game development?
I'm also amazed that you're tackling the development AND the music for the game. How do you balance the two? As a musician and composer, it feels like if I'm working on a game soundtrack then that consumes all of my time.
Sorry for the barrage of questions!
Hey, thanks for the interest!
My plan for a Kickstarter would be a "relatively" small goal, maybe around $40,000, if I'm going to contracting artists throughout the whole process. Art can get expensive and unless I have someone who I'm revenue-sharing with, it's a lot of capital that I'd have to contract straight out. But I'll detail at the end of this post what the project is kind of looking like now.
To Earworm, understand that I'm not really a dev either! Or at least, I wasn't. I didn't have any sort of training or schooling, I just took a friends game design course catalog and started reading. I study my source material very thoroughly, and I'm probably subscribed to 20+ different game design channels on YouTube, big and small. And of course, I've been playing video games all my life.
My EE degree is practically useless to me. I realized I wasn't much of an Electrical Engineer and, if I could go back, would go full Computer Science, or even minor in CS while doing art or writing. The only thing that helped me in Engineering was that Engineering was difficult, and it helps you mentally to tackle difficult concepts and ideas.
The Computer Science minor was far more important, as was my job as an associate software engineer. Helped me to think about how code is structured, where variables should go, how to right good "generic" code so that it can be built off of later, certain kinds of math, etc. In fact, a lot of it is about organization and writing well-structured code, not necessarily anything super complex.
I wanted to work on this project full time because I thought that was what was "holding me back" from fully committing to the project. But ultimately, there were many things holding me back, a lot of them personal. There was a decent amount of coal in the engine so to speak, but many days it was difficult to push myself to work, and it still is. That's not because the ideas are bad, or because I don't have the money (Although it dwindles every day), but because I've lacked focus and determination, and am often afraid of and worry about a lot of things. I've spent weeks just feeling terrible about myself and about the project, and it clearly harmed my productivity. It wouldn't have been perfect, but if I had gotten solid hours of work done every day, regardless of quality, I'd have far more to show for it.
For balancing music, I often do music in the evening. Main day is designing and programming, and I actually really like composing and messing around with instruments so I do that later on. And yeah, both are very time-consuming jobs, so much so that they're obviously normally done by individual people. But I don't have a full soundtrack or a full game, so maybe I'm not the best person to ask!
I appreciate that you ask questions, and it feels like I've got to ask more questions to with everything that I'm struggling with.
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After talking with many artists about experience, rates, and project goals, I began to get very panicked about dealing with someone only online through Discord regarding this amount of work. I'll either handle this by muscling through, changing my approach, or putting the project on hold. The art is crucially important, and for that reason it's something I feel is best done in conjunction with someone I can trust and speak to very regularly.
I'm assessing the strategy for the future and figuring out what I can still do in terms of time and budget. It may involve putting the project on the back-burner a bit, which is unfortunate.
Thank you to everyone who has expressed interest in the project. It really does mean a lot to me, and know that the project itself means a lot to me to. I am looking to improve myself so that I can make the project the best it can be, and am assessing good ways to see the project through to completion.
Hope to have an update for you soon.
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