After months of talking, debating writing, art and music production and numerous people coming and going, we have finally come to the early stage of our first working demo.

The journey of getting to a demo phase is a long and difficult one and there is still so much more for us to do. Even so, if your company manages to get to this stage, then you have been doing most things right.

By now you should have…

This week, Burning Ambition includes an Interview with Andreas Wieslander, project manager for Burning Man Studios…

This week in Burning ambition, Christopher Buckner takes a closer look at the blessings and biggest hardships that Burning Man Studios has faced to date: finding the right Project Manager and a number of skilled programmers (the blessings) and finding 3D modelers that are able to measure up to the artistic demands of production (the hardships)…

In this dual interview, Chistopher interviews Burning Man Studios two composers, Nathan Pinard and Eike Steffe. Find out how two professional composers living in different countries manage make beautiful videogame music together…

Click through to download an exclusive MP3 (“Arkady”) from the game!

One of the problems in game design that I find is, that production has a lot of surprises, and I hate surprises. Thankfully, when it has come to our music and sounds, the work has been consistently outstanding.

I count Burning Man Studios very lucky to have found some amazing talent in the fields of music and sound design. Each of the people working on the music are very professional, not only in their work and background, but in their attitudes and drive for making the music for Conquest of Heroes truly unique and original…

Also click through to download an exclusive MP3 (“This is Our Story”) from the game!

When I have looked on art web sites for colorists, I find a lot of pros making statements that colorists are a dime a dozen and the least important for production. That statement would be true for just about any artistic position as there are thousands of character and comic artists out there. Really, colorists are some of the most unused, overlooked and ignored artists in both the videogame and the comic book industries…

Get an intimate, behind-the-scenes look at Burning Man Studios in this interview with its colorist, Jesse Heagy. Find out how he got into the indie game business and what it takes to be a good colorist…

In part five I talked about the nightmare that is finding capable artist to join your team. Enough bitching. It’s time to talk about what we at Burning Man Studios do have.

The production of concept art is by far the best and most rewarding part of the design process for me regardless of the headaches it may cause. I’ve spent the better part of 15 years collecting thousands of different styles of art. I’ve studied and mimicked my favorite comic book artists for hours on end and, now, it is time for the long and painstaking process of character design…

After months of writing documentation, discussing story lines, fleshing out quest, going over game mechanics and programming, you are ready to search for artists who will help bring your epic game into the real world through concept art and design. For a writer, and frankly the entire team, this is the time that most people look forward to (until the first Beta testing begins).

To be blunt, this is also the time that you want to pull out your hair and scream all sorts of foul words in various languages to the heavens…

As the title implies, taking a great story and turning it into a game that works is probably going to be the first point where your team starts to butt heads.

Up until this part of development, everyone that is on board with the project has been throwing around ideas, elements that they want included and generally getting to know one another. But as you begin to take those ideas and implement them into the actually game design document, at least half the team won’t like the direction that the game is going, while the other half, probably won’t care…