Today we released 2 more games onto the website. Going to try a different price point for Xingpop. Xingpop's art was developed last year and I wanted to release it. I think the art is really nice if not a little simple. It is going to be interesting to see how that game goes. 

The puzzle pack # 1 has been released.

Puzzle pack

Busy week for me as we have another game coming out. I have to play test it and fix up the art. Also next week I get to work on the 3rd game and release it as well. Looking forward to the last week of June when me and my wife sit down to plan out the next 4 projects. We are going to be working on some very different game types (RPG's,Shooters and a strategy game). And yes 1 puzzle game will be developed as well. 

Busy week at my normal jobs as well with a Midnight start to one of my Shifts.

A good website to listen to indies I have found is here

Indie podcast 

Next week I plan to do a big website update adding in all my indie links I have. I will have portals, blogs, news sites, you name it :). Anyway back to some fun work like making art, the marketing stuff is ok but I need a break.

The Silkjade Lightforge is up after 1 day of solid work which was 11 hours in total :). Also got my first sale a few day back as well :).

Got to go to sleep as I have work at 5 Am and its 9:30 PM :(.

http://www.silkjade.com/Lightforge/

Today we are doing the final work on our first game Molipop. Production Started on March the 26th 2007 and is complete on May the 30th or 67 days (49 production days). 60 days is what I am targeting for production but we are also developing 4 other products at the moment. So in the space of 4 months we will have 5 porducts on the market in a "complete" form around July. Go back to this time last year and at this stage I was looking at a basic prototype game which was pretty buggy.

Also within these 4 months we also developed our company website and developed our deployment strategy. The website was very easy to develop and only took 4 days for the bulk of the work to be completed.

Currently we can produce two Molipop art level puzzle games in 1 month. Thats pretty good. To match this fast pace for the art we outsource coding to multiple teams. A design plus the place holder art only takes us 2 days to complete. A design document plus the place holder art is all that is required for a team to code the project.

I am very pleased with Molipop and how we handled the production. The difficult part for me is that I work two jobs plus work on the computer games. My wife has been a great support and we worked together on the games. I focus more on the business side and my wife can focus on the art. In march I was working 50 hours a week at my other jobs to gain the funds required. In april I droped down to 25-30 hours. And now I am working 20-25 hours part time.

Artwork and game design has never been a problem for me in the past. And I enjoy a fast production cycle of under 3 months. Mostly the 3 months is for the programming as I can handle 3 projects in 3 months with ease artwise. Its a great feeling being in charge and calling the shots as things get done. We plan to complete 8-10 products this year.

Today our first game should be completed but we need to do some solid testing. Production time was 7 weeks. Also we will have 3 more games being released over the next 4-8 weeks. The only real difficult part is my part time jobs. I currently work a early morning shift from 5 AM to 8 AM and then a 10 Am - 1 PM shift. I get home around 1:30 Pm have lunch and then work on computer games.

I am looking forward to leaving my part time jobs as this would allow me to focus more on the development of the games. However they are providing income and the computer games will need to do well on the market before I axe the jobs. Axing jobs might be a few years off.Marketing and the website is not to hard. I got some help from a good friend and its all set to go. It will take only 1 day to publish the next game now that the website is setup.