For me (Willem), Powargrid development has been a bit slower than usual of late. The agency where I work during the daytime is reorganizing, which leeches energy (even though no one will be fired), and the kids have been waking up in the middle of the night a lot. But, luckily, things are calming down (both at work and at home) and I'm picking up speed again. At the moment (well not at the moment, but up till just now and I'll continue after typing up this post), I'm working on a new mission for the campaign. It's now at the stage where things are starting to come together, which is a terrific place to be, because it feels like you're crossing the fuzzy boundary between a concept and an actual playable mission.
I took the afternoon off from work (the telephone repairman should be here shortly; brilliant excuse for an extra afternoon of hacking), and I'm sitting here wishing that all my days were like this :). And I hope that somewhere in the future, things will work out that way. We're bootstrapping Wee Free Studio next to our dayjobs for now. But once we manage to sell some games, we can start to think of working less in our dayjobs and more on games. Heck, I'm already buying three weeks of extra leave from my employer this year, so I have more time to focus on Powargrid development. Our aim for 2014 is to develop Powargrid far enough that we feel we can enter beta, to put it up for beta-sale on our website and to sell at least one copy to someone we don't know personally. Looking at the positive reviews we're receiving (such as from Alpha Beta Gamer), and the state of development Powargrid is in now, I think there's a good chance we'll hit that target at the least :).
And once that happens, who knows? I'm not a very big spender (with the small disclaimer that a mortgage and two days of daycare per week for two small children tend to eat up quite some money), so sales won't have to be enormous for me to warrant taking an extra day off work each week to spend on creating games. [As a quick aside: the tips from Mr Money Mustache help in the saving money department. He rightly states that it's a lot easier and more effective to cut your living expenses than to improve your income.]
I daresay Michiel is also willing to trade dayjob-time for game-develop-time, once we're selling enough games. Then, if we manage to create more cool games and luck is on our side, we could end up in a virtuous cycle of having to work less in our dayjobs and being able to spend more time on Wee Free Studio. Yes, that'd be cool. That'd be really cool. And even if that does not come to pass, we'll still have created a game we really like, still have learned loads while doing this and still have built up an appetite for more :).
But now it's time to stop rambling and get back to that mission, since it won't finish itself ;).
-Willem-
-Willem-
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