Honesty

As an independent developer, I tend to pride myself on my ability to remain open about the development of my projects, but sometimes it is hard to admit the truth. Either because I blame myself and feel lazy, or because I just don’t want to disappoint anyone. The realities of game development can be a lot less clear cut and pretty as some of the final results. There is honestly no medium that is harder to produce a complete work in.

I submitted Duet to the Independent Games Festival late last year. I was unfortunately not named among the excellent finalists. However, it did bring me some surprising attention, including an article on IndieGames.com. All this excitement from the outside has made it painfully apparent how slow my progress is. I haven’t even touched the code for the game in probably 3 months or so. So I feel that I should be honest with everyone about what I have been doing with the project: Nothing, at the moment.

Am I giving up on Duet? Definitely not. I believe that it is the most important game that I have worked on in my life. However, there are some difficulties which have arisen in the development which have made working on the project tiresome. Tiffany, Duet’s artist, was my fiancé at the time of her entry into the team. Now we are separated, and that makes collaboration difficult to impossible, due to the emotions involved. It is probably never advisable to build a work relationship atop a personal one.

I am doing a ground-up reimplementation of the gameplay from the original Game Maker prototype to my custom C++ and OpenGL engine. The port was envisioned as a way to achieve a more complex and modern art direction than what is possible in Game Maker. Therefore, I find it hard to be motivated when I do not have an artist working with me. I have been putting the project on hold until I could work things out with Tiffany. Now it seems clear that that is not going to happen, so I need to find another artist who is right for the job.

As you all know, life is expensive and game development is equally so. Games take a long time to develop, and progress can be slow enough when you work on it full time. Part-time progress may be enough to get Duet done, but even still, I lack the funds to pay an artist a competitive salary. So really the best I can offer anyone is a share of the final profits, after all the bills are paid of course.

Anyway, all of these factors have conspired to put Duet in a very tenuous position in it’s development. Progress is not happening, but I will inform you all as soon as I have anything new to show.

If you think you are what I’m looking for and are interested in helping make Duet look more like it plays, then you can drop me a line here, @mvandevander on twitter or on the Facebook page for the game. Please have examples of your work.