After all is said and done, I still love actual development.

So my "batchmates" have announced where they are going next.  Creators come in generations, and while most disappear as quickly as they appear, some more or less "grow together".  So whenever you see a fellow traveller who has been alongside you on the same road travelling for thousands of miles decide to take the exit lane or merge onto another highway, it kinda makes you lonely.

While I have yet to see where my Unity3D experiment takes me, what I'm sure of is that I wouldn't mind becoming a go-to full-outsource developer for Ren'Py-powered games.  I wouldn't like to be in a business of selling things and what that entails -- having worked in tech support / customer service a few years ago, I hate the idea of having to support products or listening to "customer is always right" and advertising and organizing promotions.  But I'd love to be a developer of commercial and free games so long as I have the time for it.  It would be nice to subsist on a constant royalty revenue stream and be left alone to work on something and watch it grow and develop as an engaging project.  So publishers are still kinda needed because of potential developers like myself.

Five years ago I didn't even know how to draw, to write, or how to make music.  But now I can safely say I'm "competent" enough in all those areas.  That's because, come to think about it, absent the socializing, I still enjoy making stuff.  In fact, even though I was brought on board midway during it's development, my involvement with ADRIFT has brought me the most rewarding hours of my life these past couple of weeks.  So I stay until 6:00am coding but I don't care-- I feel good.  Perhaps it's because I find more satisfaction with building and piecing things together myself than manipulating commissioned assets?  The difference between "It's not my project per se, but I can say I made this part." versus "It's my project, but I didn't make this?"  Then again, ADRIFT is at a stage where I already see the beauty of the whole work (script-complete FTW!!!) so I just need to wait a bit further and EG's day of satisfaction will come.  I can also safely assume that the Release Engineering stage is the point that gets the creators the most adrenaline and sadly most projects never reach that point.  (Full disclosure:  ADRIFT still lacks some assets so it'll still be a few weeks but yeah I'm already customizing the GUI buttons and such.  And I wouldn't have gotten any ideas on how to take the work further if it weren't for the marvelous artists already on board.).  I hope Taleweaver forgives me for sending traffic his way before he even has any content on his site, but as they say, market early to build awareness.  I'm going to give another shout-out on release day, but in the meantime I have the following tidbits (since this is on Planet EVN, so might as well):

BxG
Freeware
Science-Fiction
100,000 words

It ain't Ever17.  But it's gonna be good.

Booyeah.