What Indie Dreams Are Made Of
When we began to create Octodad, we never thought that one day we would be here working on a bigger and better sequel while being supported by the community at large. Although development is going as scheduled, I think we’re all in bit of a stupor as to the fact that it’s really happening. I myself can’t believe that I’m actually in a sense getting paid to MAKE VIDEO GAMES. I know that most of us have been dreaming of doing just this almost our whole lives and now that it’s finally here, it’s no less than a breathtaking endeavor.
Our largest inspirations for making games probably come from our wacky senses of humor. We’re always joking around about something in order to not go completely insane while being cooped up in one room for so long with the same couple people every day. Not that we don’t love one another to death, but something has to keep it light in here while we take on what is probably the largest challenge of our young lives. All of us spend somewhere between 30 and 50 hours a week working on the game so we’re pretty much a family at this point. :)
We’ve been rolling along now for a few months taking care of a bunch of pre-production business and getting the Kickstarter ready to go, but now we’ve gone into full-on development! It’s pretty damn scary, but also incredibly exciting at the same time. I personally have been having a bit of a rough start due to my computer crapping out at random times, but luckily I’ll be ordering a new one for development soon. I’ve been making due for a while now just hitting save as often as possible, but it’s getting a bit ridiculous at this point.
Recently most of us moved into a new place and we’ve designated this dining room as the Young Horses office space. We’ve got about six desks in here at the moment and there’s another on the way, but as you can see we’re nice and cozy. It’s pretty great being able to just turn around to ask a question or discuss something with a part of the team at any time. Up until now we’ve mostly been communicating via things like Skype, gChat, and email which just can’t match the efficiency of face-to-face.
Like I said before, we’ve already been hard at work as you can tell from both the boards behind Chris’s, our lead artist, desk. We’ve just made it through our first real sprint and things are looking good!
To the left you can see Chris’s fancy Cintiq which he spends countless hours on doodling up all sorts of Octodad wizardry for all of you. I’m also loafing about in the background there writing this very post.
Our mantle is covered with Octodad related goodies at the moment including a couple of the Kickstarter prize prototypes that we’ll be throwing into production quite soon. Devon, who’s one of our fancy programmers, sits on that shiny green ball all day and bounces along while typing like some sort of mad man. We also managed to slip away from the IGF pavilion at this year’s GDC with our cool marquee intact!
– Phil