My buddy, Craig, is an aspiring illustrator and concept artist. He also loves video games (which is common trait among men of my age). His dream job is to create concept art for epic fantasy and sci-fi games, but it’s hard to find work like that without knowing everybody in the business. His plan is to team up with a developer and maybe a few more key people and just build a game. It’s a decent plan – except that he recruited me as his developer.
Games take so much work just to get them to be playable and fun. After that you have to market your game and get people to buy it. (Or sell ads and give it away – but that’s this whole other thing.) Long story short: we built a kinda fun numeric puzzle game and tried to sell it instead of giving it away. We also learned a few things about animating elements in Silverlight.
I learned that one shouldn’t go to disk to read settings dozens of times a second – even if you’re using fast solid-state storage.