Building a studio from scratch: Week 8

Week 8

I’ve still been talking to people about the bigger game (the racing concept) and getting them pencilled in on the team.

Even though we have started something else, the racer has to stay on a ‘simmer’ setting as we’ll still need to get some design and concept work done on it way before we start to think about getting the 3D guys on it.

I’ve been thinking about cash flow too and have been talking to a lot more people about helping them out on their projects, this is looking very positive and it’s looking like we’ll have some outsource work in production very soon.

This is great as we have a few 3D guys free, so whilst they crack on with the outsourced 3D, we can crack on with the underwater maze game.

It seems to be quite tough for a lot of freelancers at the moment as I’ve started to get a lot of calls from contacts and friends of friends to see if there is any work going.

It’s the curse of the freelancer, unless you have some nice steady clients who pay promptly (or even at all) then you really need to work on selling al the time you’re working, to ensure that there is a steady stream of work.

That’s what it looks like will start to work for The Pixel Bullies, when we have outsource work on the go, we’ll crank through it and when we don’t we’ll crank through our own games.

It’ll still need balance or we’ll never get any games out, but with a few different projects on the go, and a few opportunities to bring some cash in, in the short term, I’m confident that we’ll be able to strike a balance and succeed in both.

I’m still undecided on the overall style for the underwater maze game, and have been looking at a few possibilities. Paul (coder) seems to be in the same state of mind as me – both would work, but which do we go for? We could play it safe and follow the crowd with the ‘cartoon’ style – but with so many games released looking very similar, you really need to stand out to be noticed.

I think this is definitely something to think about over the next few weeks – I’ll put some focus on producing some more realistic enemies to see if they can’t tip the balance.

The realistic/photographic idea was the original one, but I wasn’t sure whether we were designing the game just for ourselves to include mine and Paul’s hobby of scuba diving, or whether it was the best for the game.

To help us decide our new artist (Peter) did some test images to see how the enemies could look (shown is one of the scarier ones).

Total money spent so far: £292.63

Negatives
We still haven’t nailed down the art style, but I think we are getting very close

Positives
I really like the realistic looking enemies, I think they are much stronger than the illustrations.
– We still have the racing concept on ‘simmer’ and are still recruiting for it, which is going well.

The Pixel Bullies
andy@thepixelbullies.com
www.thepixelbullies.com
Twitter – @AndyGahan