Monday, June 11, 2012

Orcs! Oh my!

What is the best thing of being self-employed? Is it the ability to take time off spontaneously without suffering consequences of even subtle office politics? What about the creative freedom to pursue any idea basically for any platform? How about taking a laptop and working anywhere at any given time? To me, it is all those things, but at what cost?

Well, it's not the financial trade-off anymore, because I am now earning more than my old Firaxis salary. I have carefully calculated this based on the average statistics of all my Flash games - time invested, overall vacation time, and the income received from all sponsorship deals. The auction for Zombie Situation is basically over and the primary license is going for almost exactly what I predicted.

It seems to me that Flash has become a stable path for me to pursue as an indie game developer. There are so few technical problems, and play-testing has less overhead compared to mobile development. Perhaps in six months to a year I'll feel the need to gamble in the mobile space again, but for now I am satisfied.

Anyways, I have been working on my current unnamed project. I took the mechanics from the tooth prototype shown earlier, and changed the theme to make use of the art assets I already have. This is turning out to be the best option for me.


Actually, I have more than half a dozen prototypes of other genres before I came complete circle back to the run and jump shooter idea. One was a gold grabber that was inspired by many sources...



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