Thanks, absenter!

Also also thanks to everyone else, opening everyone's presents is always a pleasure

Thanks! It's a TD but with more micromanagement elements, like a light-RTS thrown on top.

I do prefer GraFX2 to ProMotion, yes. PM has some more advanced features but is missing some other ones. GraFX2 is also free and extendable with used scripts.
Overall I find GraFX2 more immediate, possibly influenced by my history of using DPaint3 and Brilliance2 on Amiga for years.

If I understand correctly, it was not a matter of Helm and Carnivac not understanding why you prefer to freelance, rather a matter of you not understanding why they want to work full-time.

Still, thanks for sharing your point of view. Here's mine.

I avoided getting a full-time job for ages, thinking it wasn't efficient in terms of time and money, but once I did get one, it learned a lot and it helped me make a clear division between my work time and my free time.
I still feel like I'm wasting my life away spending 8-9 hours in the office every day, but at least I know when I leave the office I'm a free man. Also I don't have to constantly look for work, haggle about prices or deal with late payments. That added up to taking up much more than 9 hours per day of my life.

People are different and have different needs and ideas, that is the whole point.

Indigo's post on the space game prompted me to post this here (even though all the links seem dead so I couldn't see the game or the screenies)

Anyhoo a while ago I worked on this tower defence game that combined painted bgs with pixel art characters and 3d vehicles. Oh and photo-sourced user interface.
Sounds terrible but in fact it turned out pretty decent, imo. Worth noting is the texture style we used to get the renders to match the pixel art look. Quite simple stuff, no shading (all shading drawn in textures) and some sharpening and an outline added in post-proc.

The coder made a very nice writeup on polycount, you can read the entire thing here:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=104560

Here's a little preview:





The textures are not pixel art at all but rather pixel-art informed freehand photoshopping. Time was super-scarce so everything had to be done very quickly.
For example, all the sprites have 4-frame running cycles.

Hit me up if you have any questions, I'd be glad to share.