Progress Update (and Poll on Summer Plans) news - Westeros: Age of Petty Kings mod for Medieval II: Total War: Kingdoms

For those of you who have seen the Battle of the Greenfork video, the Westerland and Northern rosters are all completed! Things are going quite swiftly, but there are still many tasks remaining. Here are all the ones I can think of right now:

• Rosters/Houses for the Vale, Riverlands, Ironborn, and Dornish
• Completely re-make Unit Cards for ALL FACTIONS
• Family Trees for the North, Vale, Riverlands, and Ironborn
• Strat Editing/Army Placement for ALL FACTIONS
• Writing for MANY unit/house descriptions maybe
• Unit Balancing for ALL FACTIONS
• Bug Fixing in at least two weeks of closed beta.

I expect that the mod will be finished sometime early in the summer, but I won't make any promises as to that (they say that the first 90% of the coding takes the first 90% of the time, and the last 10% of the coding takes the other 90% of the time). As for what will follow 2.0's release:

Whatever else happens, I plan to start out the summer finishing off AOPK 2.0. Unfortunately, my internship applications for this summer fell through leaving me out in the (fortunately metaphorical) cold. Before anyone wonders, I have absolutely no plans of monetizing this or any other mod. However, I will be in need of cash, so once 2.0 releases I'll probably be putting aside most future modding work to try my hand at indie-game development.

It is here where I would appreciate any input you guys have. If there is anyone out there with experience developing one-man projects for Steam Greenlight please shoot me a msg! I would love any advice you would care to impart. If there are any artists or programmers in the vicinity of San Diego or Santa Cruz California, I would definetly be down to team up on a project. It obviously goes without saying that anyone offering internships to aspiring game developers would find an eager applicant.For the rest of you, I would love any input you have on some ideas I've been floating around:

Half-baked idea #1: War On Terror - This would basically be a "decision making simulator". The player would have a map of the Middle East showing the current situation, and they would be presented with choices/options that a US President would be presented with (bomb Syria's chemical weapons, supply Shiite militias in Iraq against ISIS, etc). The situation would then change based on these choices and in the end the player can see how badly they did in comparison to real history. Maybe a bit too serious, but I'm a bit of a foreign policy nerd so I think I can do it pretty well.

Half-baked idea #2: Seven Citadels - This would be a top-down space shooter (Mouse points, W/S accelerate/decelerate, A/D strafe, etc). I can make half-way decent 2D graphics and my programming skills should be more than sufficient for this. The idea is that the player is tasked with destroying seven evil space-fortresses in an open world, and they can upgrade their ship along the way.

Half-baked idea #3: Citadel 6 - Lots of citadels eh? This would be a kinda-sorta tower defense game, where a wall runs down the center of the screen and the player has a mouse-controlled turret in the middle. Enemies would attack from both directions (aliens from outside the wall, rebels from inside) and the player can set up bunkers, etc between waves. I hope to include a dramatic story on the morality of violence and the conundrums faced by those on the wrong side of a war, but who knows what the final product will look like...

Half-baked idea #4: Lands and Keeps - This would be a turn-based strategy game, operating similar to a board game. The player would control a kingdom with various noble houses and they would raise armies and fight. This project is already in-progress, but I stopped work on it once it became clear that it would basically just be a slightly more complex version of Risk. However, if yall are into that sort of thing I may resume work. Here is some art I made for it awhile back (roughly the extend of my artistic potential):

Any feedback you happen to have on these projects is much appreciated! If one is a clear winner I'll probably start an indie-db page for it. Thanks,

-Admiral Thrawn

PS: For what its worth, a show of interest will help to convince my folks that my summer is best spent working on one of the above projects as opposed to, say, bagging groceries or something ;).