[RampantCoyote]

And to make up for my happy "oops" before --- another problem with doing a "big" project where you forget what's already been done...

I spent three hours last night updating and improving what turned out to be an obsolete version of a dungeon. So I got to spend another hour merging the changes back together again. D'oh.

Happily, the formerly-obsolete version is now (hopefully) sporting the best of both versions. If I caught them all... But I sure did end up re-doing a lot of work.
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Tales of the Rampant Coyote - Old-School Game Developer talks Indie Games, RPGs, and the Games Biz

[Malignus]

[RampantCoyote]

Okay, this question is particularly for Malignus, who is obnoxiously multitalented like so many others on this board who are NOT me, and can do art, music, design, AND code, AND probably juggle while simultaneously solving complex differential equations in their heads, but I'm curious about everyone's take:

How much time do you spend coding, versus testing, content creation, management, and "non-development" tasks (like marketing and business development tasks) for your game?
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Tales of the Rampant Coyote - Old-School Game Developer talks Indie Games, RPGs, and the Games Biz

[Mattias Gustavsson]

I think I probably spend the least time on coding - writing code is fairly easy, I think. I certainly spend more time on "art" (or at least trying to make Poser stuff to look sort of ok). I find game design to be very very difficult though, and I spend quite a bit of time both studying and practising that area (including the whole story-telling bit). I don't really do any music/marketing/business though - I guess I would if I have any real indie ambitions, but I'm happy to be the dabbling hobbyist :D
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www.mattiasgustavsson.com - My blog
www.rivtind.com - My Fantasy world and isometric RPG engine
www.pixieuniversity.com - Software 2D Game Engine

[Malignus]

[Rainer Deyke]

[Amirai]

Wow, I can tell I have a lot to learn on the programming front... for me it's like 90% of the time coding/bugfixing. Why in the world did I think tackling an RPG and learning to code at the same time was a good idea?

In my opinion, the art's far easier than the code, Though I suppose that's obvious since I'm an artist first. Maybe I should team up with someone. :/
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loot-pursuit.com

[AdmiralTofu]

[Malignus]

[PsySal]

Lately I've been thinking more in terms of artistic limitations. Typically what happens during game dev is I have some great (or eventually it turns out not-that-great) idea and want to put it in the game. However, this often requires some kind of extension to the engine, which I then tackle. This takes a lot of time.

Another way of building games, though, is to stick to a smaller set of features and work them to death. An obvious example is vvvvvv but actually there are many more. In particular, for RPGs if you look at DQ1 or many early RPGs they actually had simple-ish systems in place (think of the FF1 dialogue system)-- but they worked them to death.

Anyhow, that's where I'm trying to move. After this project =)

[Bjorn]

I got stuck on the 2D MMORPG thing from back when ElvenProgrammer came here to ask for help with The Mana World. These days I'm in the process of rewriting the client on top of Qt and QML (JavaScript based), which makes it possible to enhance the UI quite a bit and will also allow it to be playable on mobile phones.

I don't develop the entire game though, there's other people developing content, so I basically do only C++ and QML programming. I still dream of once also doing some amazing art or other content, but I already don't have enough time for doing all the programming, so I wonder if I'll ever get around to that.

I also dream of once doing this full time, but so far I have no idea how to make money while still keeping with the spirit of free software, and I don't know anything about setting up a business either. So for now I'll stick with my current job.