Artwork & Reliability

You know what sucks? Having to make artwork. Placeholders really won't do for working out a lot of the finer points in a videogame. Especially when it comes to things like frame count/speed.
I've been trying not to bug my artist friend too much, because I've already lost enough talented people by doing that. (One, by the way)
When working with someone on a casual project (casual as in nobody's getting paid, there's no publisher or corporate deadline) it's always a good idea to have a backup plan.
If you have a musician, make sure they're using a style you/someone else can replicate, or have all music remade from scratch.
If you have a programmer, make sure they're documenting their code so that you or some other programmer can pick up where they left off if necessary.
And if you have an artist, be ready to replace them/their artwork if they leave.

So of course I'd been trying to prepare in case Raymundo quit on me. (And I mean, he's fairly busy anyway regardless of him quitting or not.) I'd only planned for him to do the character artwork, because I can do environments alright. But this means he would probably be making every foe in the game, and that's a lot to ask when you can basically guarantee nothing in return.
My one or two attempts so far to try and make the game's character really scared me off trying it, but I wanted the freedom, so I tried again today. Here's what the progression of the sprite looked like:


I'm actually very happy with the end result. If I could animate this and use it as a design template for the other characters, I think I could honestly see this being the final design, instead of the current one. But it all depends on what Ray does, and how well I can make this thing move.
Interestingly it's basically a median between Jasper and Ray's artstyle. (Since I took inspiration from both)



Going back to my earlier topic...
If you're going to make enemies with the members of your own dev. team, for God's sake: Do it early on. The collateral damage is so much easier to cope with that way. You do NOT want to be %50 done before the programmer says "fuck this shit" and you're left with a bucket of spaghetti and a buggy game. Do you wanna let that happen? No way Jose! That's why I like working on my own. Group projects are fun, but they need to end really quickly. I was pretty comfortable coordinating one for two weeks, but if something goes wrong beyond that point things can start getting pretttty hairy. Problems even a month into development can completely rock the foundations of a project.

Thanks for reading once again.
Cheers,
～zxin