For me, the most hair-raising part of developing a completely new game is just getting started. This is when you have to make an endless string of decisions about the game that have to be right. One wrong critical decision now might or might not ruin the game, but will certainly deflate some of the polish and sense of excitement from the finished game. Fixing problems later on can take a tremendous amount of time and effort, at a point when time can equal a great deal of money.

Granted, this is all tremendous fun as well.

Nothing gives me bigger problems than the visual appearance of the game, complicated by the fact that I have little artistic talent and less training. I’ve spent a lot of time with the appearance of the game I started on recently. The first issue was designing the original nine playable and eleven non-playable species, and I decided to give them a vaguely non-terrestrial look reflected in various odd proportions together with combinations of shaggy manes, crests and ruffs.

The first thing I noticed was that solid shading or any type of ‘cartoony’ style simply did not work. In these stylized artistic styles, skewed proportions are a normal part of the appearance and your eye just takes it for granted. The odd proportions that I was trying to capture effectively disappeared. Airbrushed shading is very time-consuming, but it adds enough realism that the long, thin bodies and rangy limbs retain the off-normal look I needed. I reluctantly decided that airbrush shading was the only way to go, since it usually takes more time than solid shading.