I’ve entered into a contract with Brendon Williams to compose the game’s music. He’ll be doing everything from intro music, battle music, world map music, and any other types of music that come up. Brendon recently started with the music for the intro movie and it’s sounding awesome.

I’ve received a bunch of animations over the last few months and you can see a lot of them over at Dualbo’s Vimeo Site and in my status updates. I’ve received 12 of the 18 characters that will be in the game, so we’re two-thirds there. I think this payment has officially put my game over budget, but that’s how these things go sometimes. The good news is that the animations are awesome and worth every penny.

This expense wasn’t a lump sum payment, but 4 payments made over the course of a couple months. I’m extended the original contract with the illustrator because the game has more artwork than I originally anticipated. The following illustrations were done for this update:

This expense wasn’t a lump sum payment, but about 10 payments made over the course of a few months. I’m at the end of my original contract with an illustrator, and so far he’s delivered:

Two more characters were completed, which brings me to a total of 4 characters. This expense was about $450 more than I had originally budgeted for due to the unexpected time associated with animating weapons. Basically, characters with weapons will cost a little bit more to animate, and I’m fine with that.

I was using Corona’s free product for awhile, but I decided to upgrade to the pro subscription once I continuously encounter bugs with live builds on the free trial. My game is still a ways off from completion, and I wish I could have used the free trial problem free for a little bit longer, but I knew I’d have to fork up the money eventually.

I’ve been working with the an illustrator and animator for a few weeks now they’ve produced the world map, multiple battlefield maps, concept characters, character turnarounds, and 2 animated characters (semi produced). I’m pretty close to staying on budget so far, but I can see how both artists could end up costing a bit more than I originally thought.

I had a couple of animators create test animations off of one of my character concepts just to see if their style fit what I have in mind for the game. Both animators were able to mock up a 3D animation in about 3 hours. Neither of the trial animators was the right fit for me this time around, but I’ll hold onto their contact information for the future.

I found an illustrator for my game, and he started out by creating some character concepts and a couple of battlefield scenes.

I’ve been looking for an animator and the three methods of recruitment that I used were making a blog post, reaching out to people I admired on Carbonmade, and paying for a job listing on Behance. I received 52 applications within 5 days and ended up finding the right man for the job through Behance. If he works out, then this was $200 well spent.

I made a list of illustrators who I planned on contacting for trial illustrations, but I lucked out by having Scott Pellico go first. Scott illustrated a piece of my world map as a trial to see if his style was a fit for the world I’d like to create. He nailed it and I’m lucky to have found a quality illustrator on the first go.

I thought I could avoid throwing down any cash for sprite sheet development, but I finally broke down and purchased Texture Packer. They just make sprite sheet creation too easy, and the tool spits out exactly what the Corona SDK needs to render and scale sprites.

I thought I’d kick this contest off by purchasing a little bed time reading material. I want to start prototyping games as soon as possible, so hopefully a few books on game theory and design will help me to avoid some of the mistakes beginners make.