An art direction has been decided upon for Aigilas. Bosses are already based on an animal associated with each sin. There were a lot of whiteboard sketches before deciding upon a core aesthetic. Rough sprites have been thrown into the GitHub repo for now.

With a clearer art style in mind, I was able to pump out seven more enemy concepts. Once the polished sprites are ready then I will describe the process I went through to settle upon an art style.

I stripped skill and player classes data out of the code base and into config files. Making changes to these areas is now a lot easier. Even people without programming knowledge will be able to toy around with the internals of the game. My hope is that this will open the door for younger kids, should a game development program take off with local schools.

Fridays are when I have my dedicated “business” evening. I throw together these posts, do more research on the non-development portions of the game and a number of other tasks. Tonight, I read articles and watched videos about marketing and public relations. They were all selections from this big list on the Pixel Prospector’s page

Now I’m chewing on the price structure for the game. First and foremost, Aigilas must remain open source if there is any hope of getting this into schools. I want to take this opportunity to see whether or not open source games can succeed financially. Aigilas is only the first of many games I have planned. I will release each game with all assets under open licenses if there exists a way for those projects to fund my work.

Two ideas floating around right now are:

  1. Open source everything and charge people for support. If they have a bug they want fast tracked or need hand holding, then they will pay me a premium
  2. Open source only the code and provide dev art/sound/music in the repo. I will provide binaries containing higher quality assets for a predetermined price.

I will be listening to many people and reading more about this particular domain, since the indie market doesn’t have a set-in-stone pricing model to follow. In a perfect world, I could make these games for free and not worry about generating any money. If only people would stop providing such useful services that require my paycheck!

Want to chat? Throw a comment on this Reddit post or shoot me a tweet @XBigTK13X.