One month of fulltime development

Seven years gone...

After working on the game in my spare time for around seven years now I finally take some time off of work to develop full time for a whole month. The means the loss of a whole months wage for me and my family and the decision was not easy, but it is very hard to keep track of the development if you only have an hour or so every other day to work.

Spare time game development in practice

In practice it looks like this: I need a new animation for a character and the last time I animated something was weeks ago. The skeletons of the worms are quite complex to handle (for those who are technically interested: I use a custom made spline IK system with animateable handles and IK, intermediate and deform bone layers to have a smooth and bug free conversion from IK to FK for exporting to Unity) and doing animations with weeks or month in between means that I have to basically relearn doing animations which is very time consuming and frustrating.

The goal

My goal for October, the month I will have my Sabbatical, is to finish the game. I guess the time frame is too short to have the voice overs done by end of the month but I want to have the game playable from start to finish with all puzzles, scenes, dialogues, animations, sound fx, music and cutscenes included. It's a tough goal and I guess it won't be a 9 to 5 job (more like 9 to 9), but I'm very motivated and "hungry" for the weeks to come.

Wish me luck!