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.

Bulletproof Outlaws - Game 1 - A Diary of a video game studio!

This is the dynamite flinging toward the player. The dynamite is going to explode as it arcs downward toward the player and the player will have to be outside of a certain radius to avoid the explosion. This one will probably be harder to dodge. Not sure what I’ll do for the explosion, I’m messing a bit with doing cel-shaded particle effects in 3d and then rendering them out as PNG files, but I might end up hand-drawing it.

I figure throwing-stars, fire arrows, and explosives will be enough for harmful objects… but to balance them out, I need some helpful objects. The player doesn’t have any hit-points, he gets 3 lives and loses one each time he’s hit… so I figure I’ll have something that restores one life, restores all 3 lives, and I’m thinking about doing a “speed scroll” that slows the rest of the game down but keeps the player moving at normal speed Matrix-style for a few seconds. Haven’t decided on that last one, the animations will probably get pretty choppy looking if I slow things down but I’ll probably test out how it looks visually.

Our business coaches have recommended that we keep track of our financials on a monthly basis. Some of the other businesses in our class are already making money because they offer services or already-made products. Since I have to develop the game before I can make any money, I know before I even open my spreadsheet that I’m going to be losing money this month on my start-up costs and such. It would be more awesome to have positive numbers everywhere, but this is all part of the plan (a dip at the start till I get some games out and then a slow rise up) so it’s not worrying. I could skip this month’s financials but I figure I’ll check out exactly where I’m at and it’s good to get in the habit.

ugh…caught my roommate’s cold so I’m pretty toast. Spent today just sleeping, blowing my nose, and barfing. Gonna’ end up a couple days behind schedule because of this I’m sure, I can’t even look at my screen without my eyes hurting and my head pounding right now.

Still feeling sick, but better than yesterday at least!  I can sit at the computer screen without wanting to barf haha Since I’m not much good for art still, I figured I’d answer some reader E-Mail.  Of course I only have a few of them, so this should be easy haha  If anyone reading has questions, feel free to send them my way and you TOO could be immortalized in an obscure niche game development blog on the Internet.  Incidentally the Favorite Dinosaur question is awesome… I got a serious business E-Mail from an advertising company and nothing lightens up a serious business E-Mail than seeing at the top of the E-Mail: “Favorite Dinosaur: Stegosaurus”  Anyway, onto the E-Mails:

Bulletproof Outlaws Diary