There's always an excuse not to work on a personal project

Wow. I looked at my last post from when I worked for the Microsoft Surface team. Now I work for Garage Games, creating tutorials for Torque 3D. I keep saying, "Once this contract is over, I can focus on Emeralda." Riiiight. I've said that for 6 contracts now. As soon as I stop working, I panic about money, and find another gig.

Time to start working on this in the evenings. We've got no kids yet, so now's the time, before my stupid inherited 24/7 defacto maternal responsibilities come into play. (Grrrrr. Let's face it, as egalitarian as my hubby is, who's going to be the one assumed to be on-call?)

I went to a Serious Play Conference last week that provided me with some awesome nuggets of info about where to go from here, so now I'm all inspired again. I found out about a book that is already giving me good guidance, Unschooling Rules by Clark Aldrich.

I also came across an article, How to Build a Game in a Week from Scratch with No Budget.

Nope, not going to be done in a week, nor from scratch, but it gave me an idea. One of the things I learned at the conference was that a game demo is perceived to be a good demo if the art is near-production quality. If you want to get people emotionally invested in a game, have the art up-to-snuff. I'm not sure how true that is. I mean, I met the students at DigiPen who created the game that was purchased by Valve and turned into Portal. Their game had completely different graphics--sort of a medieval dungeon. The Valve people zoned in on the portal gameplay mechanic and saw its potential. So, what's true? Is art quality important or not?

I figure I'll take art completely out of the equation by purchasing it all. I'm gonna use the art packs at http://www.garagegames.com/products/browse/artpacks and assets from http://www.turbosquid.com/ and http://www.frogames.net. My internal compass will be, "How Fast Can I Build a Serious 3D Game Demo with a Middling Budget". :)