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Game Development Linux Game Development Personal Development

Thousander Club Update: March 3rd

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 409.25(previous two years) + 13 (current year) = 422.25 / 1000
Game Ideas: 710 (previous two years) + 35 (current year) = 745 / 1000

Killer Kittens from Katis Minor now has a credits screen. I know I said that all I needed was a credits screen and a license for the game data, but I just realized that I still have placeholder graphics that haven’t been updated. Specifically the main background and the player’s ship. You know, the things you see throughout the game! I want to release this game and get some feedback, but I already know from experience that I will get a lot of comments about how crappy the graphics are. I’d like to fix these problems before release. Besides, if the art isn’t a bit better, there isn’t much of a point of having a decent license for its use.

Ideally I could have just grabbed some free sprites from somewhere. I know decent quality free sprites have to be available on the World Wide Web, but all of the websites that I have been able to find that offer free sprites aren’t offering anything that I could use in my game. They either don’t work with my theme or they put me at risk for copyright infringement. I really don’t want Sega or Nintendo coming after me, so no, I don’t think I will use some of the billions of Sonic and Mario sprites out there. I knew about The Linux Game Tome’s Game Development forum and the Repository for Free Game Content sticky post, and I know GameDev.net has a similar thread called Sprites, sprites, and more sprites!. Both seem to point to websites with copy infringement problems or art that isn’t appropriate for my theme. I searched for some time, but I think it will be less of a hassle to create some better programmer art instead.

And so Version 1.0 is even closer to reality, and I plan on taking some time off at the day job soon so I should be able to throw a lot more time into finishing this game. I also hope that I can release it and quickly move on to prototyping a new game during this period. I think that creating a second game in a matter of days after releasing this first one would be a fun challenge.

[tags]game design, productivity, personal development, video game development, indie[/tags]