I spoke to the guy running this site yesterday. The art looks good, the guy sounds professional and intelligent, his English is fine, and their rates are good. So assuming nothing goes amiss in the meantime I’ll be hiring them to do the art for my MMOG.
An added plus is we are using the same game engine so they know exactly what format I need and can test stuff before sending it to me. They also have some programming talent so I probably won’t have to spend time explaining technical requirements.
Assuming they are able to do the work (and I have no reason to believe otherwise) this solves two problems:
1. How do I find my artists
2. How do I pay for them (in this case I can pay outright or do some programming work for them).
I have a pretty clear plan in front of me now:
Finish autopatcher and miscellaneous 2.x features on RakNet [1 week]
Load balancing and clustering plugin [1 week]
RakNet 3.0 features [1 week]
Rip out the netcode from the Reality Engine and put in my MMOG framework [4 weeks]
Work on the actual game code [6 months?]
Testing and tuning [??? months]
I have no idea how long testing will take. I’ll ship it when the game reaches critical mass. A good metric is customer retention rate. When you have customers who are still playing the game after 2-3 months and your traffic is not only increasing but accelerating then it’s a good time to ship.