DAY FOUR - ART!
I do a lot of my own artwork for my games. For Democracy I employed an artists to do the icons, which were just beyond me, and I bought some stock art from istockphoto, a great site for getting high quality art for games. For Starship Tycoon I did almost everything, an artists did some crew images.
A lot of people who do indie games employ an artist to do everything. There are two ways to do this, give them a roaylty split, or pay them outright. I don't like royalty splits myself. If a game is a shock suprise hit, I could end up having lost a lot of money. And if I don't believe in the game enough to spend a few hundred quid on art, I have other problems.
Unfortunately, I can't really afford proffesional art for everything, its just too costly. And during development, I need some 'coder art' mockup stuff so I can get a feel for things.
For reasons that are hard to explain, I needed an abacus image for the new game. This was a sudden silly idea, but I ran with it and knocked up an abacus in 3D Studio MAX:

I think that's not bad for coder art?