Spring 2008 at Cornell: (Hopefully) Stage IV’s semester

It’s Sunday. It’s cold. It’s (almost entirely) snow-less.

But hey I still love being back.

Stage IV didn’t really get much motion over winter break. I really find it hard to do school work while home. But I just finished up most of the obligatory day-before-classes-start schedule rearrangement, and it looks as though I’ll have a nice chunk of time this semester for it, which makes me happy. Conversely, it looks like 3 out of 4 of my game design minor classes need to be taken this fall, which is, ironically enough, probably going to rule out a game project in fall. Oh well. I tried.

As of now, Stage IV consists of the work I did over summer + a bit during fall 2007, plus a little experiment in Windows GUI work for the editor.

I’m worried about how the project will go. That’s natural, I guess, but this isn’t going to be like Guardin’ the Garden or Music Monsters (the former, btw, failed to break into the 2008 IGF… but hey there’s always next year). The team I’m envisioning for Stage IV is myself doing programming/textual content creation, a photographer to get all the shots, and maybe another artist for GUI + other effects. Definitely a smaller team than usual. I’m considering whether I want to try to bring another programmer on or not (if I can even find somebody who’s interested). Obviously, the project can be a bit more ambitious with 2x the programming, but I’m not sure of two things:

1.) Is my current concept of Stage IV too much for me alone to do in the coming semester?
2.) If the answer to 1.) is no, then does the concept need to be expanded?

I’m torn because I’d rather not do a solo-programmer sort of game (I prefer teams…), but I’m just not sure that additional programmers would help. Guess I’ll have to see who’s signed up for 400/490 in the coming week and make the call then.