Hi!
Since a heatedly discussed topic which goes on throughout the development of AWAM is the development times, how fast or slow the progress of AWAM is.
I have some interesting new points. Oceanlab, the dev of "Where it all began" and "Summer´s gone", talked a bit about life as a single person game developer.
The important thing about his speech is this: In the beginning he underestimated how much impact even hobby development had on his life, how close to burnout he was and that he worked 12-14 hours daily on his 2 games but still had far less output to show than today.
He recognised that something had to change and that was a) his mindset and b) to start developing games the smart, efficient way. For one of his early chapters it took him 9 months to produce 1400 renders (of considerable quality, while inferior to his current pics even his old ones outshine many other games on site), the current youngest update released not long ago took 3(!) months for 1520 renders of even higher quality plus several animations! And he works on both games.
An interesting tidbit about that: These two chapters (old and new) were made on the same render PC, his hardware had not changed. But he will upgrade his render machine soon, because becoming efficient and effective lets Ocean create pics faster than his current PC can render! What an upswing from muddying through at first.
For comparison:
Old render (early development chapter)
And a new render (not the same person, just to show the quality jump)
It is obvious Oceanlab learned the right lessons. He got faster, he makes gorgegous renders and works on two games.
It remains to be seen if L&P can do the same just for AWAM. I doubt it, because L&P becomes only slower.