ID:265527
 
I think the one major thing stopping a lot of people from ever finishing products is graphics! I personally never finish anything because i need graphics for something in order to make things smooth and not so squary.

What are your techniques for getting around doing graphics, or suggestions?
I always just use placeholder graphics - hooray for stick figures, smiley faces, and one-colour turfs! =P

The only problem is that those placeholders sometimes end up sticking, like the planets in Yet Another Generic Space Age Conquest Game. =)
All of my games-in-development use text mode. No graphics to worry about at all! The reason I prefer textmode to placeholder graphics is that, when I put the real graphics in, the text-mode will still be avaliable for anybody that prefers to use it.
Do the graphics first? Seriously, I can't stand not getting through some coding without drawing something. Why not draw while you code? Need a login screen, but don't have the images? Then make the derned images! Can't handle not having pretty grass to wander around on, then make the grass! If you can't draw, draw as well as you can, or hire someone to draw for you. There's no real reason the graphics should be the last thing you do, especially considering they take the most amount of work and creativity.

If you end up using crappy temporary graphics, you may never get around to making decent permanent ones. Might as well bite the bullet and work the graphics into the creation of each system. It will break the workload up, keep you focused on the end results of graphics and code, and will help speed along the development process. By the time you finish coding, you should have a complete game ready for publication.

~X
When I work on my projects, I do my graphics whenever I find a lull in my development where I'm no longer interested in hammering out code.

The problem, of course, comes when I get bored of both the graphics and the programming, because that's always the point at which I switch projects to something else. So I'm not sure I'd recommend following in my footsteps.