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Incredibly inspiring, to be sure, but I can't help but wonder: how do you iterate and learn over the course of such a long-haul project? For me, the creative pr

Incredibly inspiring, to be sure, but I can't help but wonder: how do you iterate and learn over the course of such a long-haul project? For me, the creative process involves exploring a lot of dead ends until I find the right path or develop my skills sufficiently. If you're doing one scene a day for four years straight, how do you end up with a consistent product at the end? How do you apply what you've learned to the mountain of drawings you've already put behind you? Also, tangentially, how do you make money when you're working 15-hour days on your passion project for 4 years straight? Anyway, I'm really looking forward to watching this! Any Bay Area screenings in the near future?

zanny 10y ago
Passion projects are rarely profitable. You make them for you - because you are compelled to. By definition of the production, nobody else wants it as much as you do, so you are not going to find anyone who would value it more than your own times worth, which is usually what it takes to get salaried or hourly employment. You can definitely kickstart something like this, though. Once you have something great out there, making a trailer and pitching it to the Internet and hoping to get enough money to live off while making it is a possibility. It is just never a certainty. Any artistic passion project must be done for the final product, not for any hopeful long term fiscal reimbursement for it, because its success is bound to how much the people that come into contact with it agree with your valuation of your own work. The real question is, how in the 21st century are more people not able to pursue their passions like this.
dcw303 10y ago
Only slightly related to your tangent, but I've been wondering about the economics of funding a solo indie game project. From what I've seen on Twitter, most of these seem like passion projects as well, but the creators are very much looking for a source of income. At the risk of wandering even more off topic, it's pretty dispiriting when you see the leaders of the pixel art community with 20k+ followers begging to do a commission for for 25 bucks. That's not my definition of success.

zanny 10y ago

Passion projects are rarely profitable. You make them for you - because you are compelled to. By definition of the production, nobody else wants it as much as you do, so you are not going to find anyone who would value it more than your own times worth, which is usually what it takes to get salaried or hourly employment. You can definitely kickstart something like this, though. Once you have something great out there, making a trailer and pitching it to the Internet and hoping to get enough money to live off while making it is a possibility. It is just never a certainty. Any artistic passion project must be done for the final product, not for any hopeful long term fiscal reimbursement for it, because its success is bound to how much the people that come into contact with it agree with your valuation of your own work. The real question is, how in the 21st century are more people not able to pursue their passions like this.

dcw303 10y ago

Only slightly related to your tangent, but I've been wondering about the economics of funding a solo indie game project. From what I've seen on Twitter, most of these seem like passion projects as well, but the creators are very much looking for a source of income. At the risk of wandering even more off topic, it's pretty dispiriting when you see the leaders of the pixel art community with 20k+ followers begging to do a commission for for 25 bucks. That's not my definition of success.