Useful Links

 Interview with Gemini Rue's creator:
http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/946/postmortem_joshua_nuernbergers_.php

Before Gemini Rue, I had worked on a five-year-long failed epic before giving that up and completing my first game, La Croix Pan in 2007. From those previous projects, I experienced the weight that over-ambition can have on a game and the importance of constraining your scope to reasonable limits. Because of that, I was determined not to let over-ambition prevent Gemini Rue from ever seeing the light of day like so many other independent projects. It's so easy, especially when you are starting out as a game designer, to get seduced by delusions of grandeur, endless feature additions, and revisions to make a game "better" (when all you're really doing is modifying, not improving content), and so I made the incentive to safeguard myself from that while creating Gemini Rue.

I did this by trying to get the entire game done as fast as possible, regardless of how the game looked, played, or felt -- I opted to finish it first, and then go back and revise it; otherwise, there was a good chance that I would never complete the game. By building the entire game from the ground up in skeletal form, I had a fully playable build within eight months

Pixel art tutorial:
http://shatten.sonores.de/2010/01/12/how-we-make-our-graphics/