Jeff Hangartner – Revealing the Path Less Travelled in Video Game Industry

Jeff HangartnerJeff Hangartner, the founder of the gaming start-up, Bulletproof Outlaws has been a professional developer of games over the last half a decade. Creator of Pixelation, the 1st Pixel Art Forum and also originator of the Pixel tutorials which have been published in the form of a book. Jeff has always been a pioneer of the gaming industry.

CG Today is proud to present Jeff’s exploration as he shares the whole process of creating a start-up right from day 1. With the belief that gaming development is coming back to its original “one programmer in the basement roots” idea, Bulletproof Outlaws is chronicling every step of its start-up process from strategies, to marketing, setting goals and outsourcing, successes and failures. The aim is to help other developers who have ideas but are intimidated by the whole start-up process and are not sure how to go about it.

You can visit his website Bulletproof Outlaws to know more about him or send an email to get connected.

While Derek works on the iPhone version of the game, I’m busy scaling the animations up to iPad size and retina screen size. I actually think the game could get away without a retina version because everything is anti-aliased and cell-shaded so all the retina will do is make things a little sharper (vs a game with photographic elements or 3d, where there are tons of different shades/textures/details), but if it’s an easy port then why not! I have to say once again that I love the iDevice screens…they’re so vibrant and the game looks really good in action with all the glows and such. Next up is to scale the animations to retina size. Then I have to do a bunch of non-directly related work, like create a Bug Report form, a Trailer, fill in the “Get More Games” page, etc. I’ve got a lot of Bonus Features in the game, but most of them will be external links (like linking to this devBlog you’re reading right now haha) so I basically have to create the content in those external links. Plus I should probably do my taxes soon, haha

My days pretty much consist of working whenever I’m awake. I roll out of bed, flip on the laptop, start working, take breaks to eat and down an energy drink or two, then work till I pass out. It’s a lot of work, but at the same time it’s hard to call it “work” because it’s awesome. I’m creating stuff that I want to create. Working on a project you hate or aren’t interested in is rough, because when you work long hours on it the fact that you don’t care about it just compounds the fact that you’re stuck working on it. But when the project is something you’re proud of, it’s a lot easier to put in a few more hours. I’ve definately learned some lessons about scheduling and feature-creep and my next game will be way smaller/simpler (unless like, this game sells a jillion copies, haha but I don’t expect it to do that). I’m excited to start designing it, I have a ton of ideas, just have to sit down and go through them and decide which ones will be small projects and then flesh them out…but I’m trying not to get ahead of myself so I’m forcing myself to focus 100% on finishing this game. One thing at a time!

And now…some much needed sleep!

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Bulletproof Outlaws Diary