Thanks, guys; I really appreciate the kind words. :)

how much time actually passed from the initial date of conception of the game idea to this years release? Looking back at the time passed for this game, is there anything you would do different or that you think could lessen the time passed, or do you think the time passed is what you reasonably should expect from this kind of development?

Well over a year; it went something like this:

1. Hey, wouldn't this game be neat?
2. Let's prototype it.
3. Let's forget about it for a year.
4. Hey, this is a good idea, let's pick it up again.
5. Six months pass.
6. Finished!

I would like to have gotten Step 5 down to 2 months, but I really like the idea of prototyping something and letting it sit for a while.

Time in hours actually spent to bring idea to release

Yanno, I'm embarassed to say that I haven't added this all up. I'll try to do that, as it's worth knowing. It certainly wasn't 6 months full-time, by any means, as we were chewing away at a few other things.

Now in retrospect, did you encounter any particular pitfall or difficulty that used up a lot of time and energy that you'd rather spent on something else and how would you avoid it now if you could?

This project has been great for us all-around, but my Right-Hand Man and I sat down last week to do a project postmortem, and here were a few of the mistakes we made (this is pretty much verbatim from our brainstorming session, so it's a little stream-of-consciousness):

Quote:

---

Final crush -- A wee bit too exhausting? We should have known it'd have been an all-nighter. We went to a tapas party, instead of working through, which was actually a GOOD idea.
.
Waste -- Uncontrolled creation of assets led to waste. How many models did we not use? How many maps did we waste?
.
Planning -- A month's plan was never put together. There was no outline/schedule. "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it."
.
Milestone retrospectives -- We should have CONSISTENTLY looked back to see where we'd been. But we didn't. S/b once every 2 weeks? 3 weeks? 4 weeks? There must be a balance. Meta-retrospectives.
.
Scheduling -- The 8-hour blocks of straight paired work were wrong. Too long.
.
Lack of accountability -- THE SINGLE LARGEST PROBLEM. I didn't have to answer to anyone for most of the project. However, when we *did* have the commitment to (external licensors), it worked great.

---

Again, a bit stream-of-consciousness. :)

in your opinion what is the most important point or points to keep in mind that will help an Indie to follow through with a complete game project all the way from idea to release?

Took me ten years to get through my thick skull, but I finally figured it out: work on a 2-month development cycle. For the next few years, we will avoid projects that will take more than 9 months, at any rate. I can't take it anymore!

What happened to galaxy rage?

We back-burnered it to do Wonderful. I'm trying to re-jigger the design to make it marketable, but The Wonderful End of the World project brought with it a moment of clarity -- Galaxy Rage, in the direction we were trying to push it, would not have sold any copies. Even if we created it as planned, we wouldn't have made a good profit off of it.

It hurts to realize this, but what can you do? :)