Artwork Angst
I'm suffering art angst - the phenomena of knowing that your coder-art is just not very good. I do most of ym own art (can you tell?) and I'm having pangs of thinking its one thing that's holding back the sales of my games.
There are three ways to solve this:
1) become better at art (would take a LONG time, and I may not have much natural ability here)
2) pay a good artists to do all my art. risky - as I would be investing lots of money (in relative terms) in a project that may not sell.
3) Get an artist to work for a royalty split.
I tend to dislike 3, partly because I fear a game being a runaway hit and losing a huge chunk of cash, and partly because people tend to underestimate the amount of work I have to do (Code/Design/marketing/Sales), meaning I'd have to give away too much of a split.
I'm thinking about maybe hedging between 2 and 3 at the moment. My next game MUST have better art than Democracy did. It really does need to sell at least as well as Democracy if I can make a go of this independent game thing, and that means it can't be let down by its art. Doing your own games is a bit like playing a slot machine with 6 months of your life or £20,000 for each pull of the lever. Democracy was a bit of a hit, but can I assume I'll win ever time? *bites fingernails*.
I'm suffering art angst - the phenomena of knowing that your coder-art is just not very good. I do most of ym own art (can you tell?) and I'm having pangs of thinking its one thing that's holding back the sales of my games.
There are three ways to solve this:
1) become better at art (would take a LONG time, and I may not have much natural ability here)
2) pay a good artists to do all my art. risky - as I would be investing lots of money (in relative terms) in a project that may not sell.
3) Get an artist to work for a royalty split.
I tend to dislike 3, partly because I fear a game being a runaway hit and losing a huge chunk of cash, and partly because people tend to underestimate the amount of work I have to do (Code/Design/marketing/Sales), meaning I'd have to give away too much of a split.
I'm thinking about maybe hedging between 2 and 3 at the moment. My next game MUST have better art than Democracy did. It really does need to sell at least as well as Democracy if I can make a go of this independent game thing, and that means it can't be let down by its art. Doing your own games is a bit like playing a slot machine with 6 months of your life or £20,000 for each pull of the lever. Democracy was a bit of a hit, but can I assume I'll win ever time? *bites fingernails*.
posted by cliff at
6:42 PM
