Where the F Have I been?

Sheesh, let me go back to where I left you. I start scripting and coding. Its going slowly but moving forward. As I go I fix almost every bug with the help of Unreal Developers at work, and they are things were I'm like WTF?!?! I keep going back trying to solve them myself but the devs here fix them in under 10 minutes, while I stare at code and try things for hours. One of the developers is working on an XNA game that looks like complete garbage, b/c he only cared about the code and game mechanics. he's particularly talented in what he does, solves many of my issues. We come up with a game idea to work on together, but first he need to finish his 3 years of work already invested game. I decide if I want a team-mate I need to, in this case, help him first finish his game and we can re-work and reuse the assets in the next game that will be in Unreal.
So where does that leave us? Well I've been making space ships, lots of them. But that's not very easy when you have to redesign, UV, and texture them. I had to re-learn a hard surface texturing workflow and practice a bunch of things (doing it wrong many times) before I got it right. So now I'm like a hand full of ships down, with 2 more hand fulls to go. Whats the game you ask? The Dev blog for that game can be found here: http://galacticrogue.com/ a lot of the art, like the characters, will not be redone, and will look as good as it does, the ships and planets are the things I'm working on. Also Andrew is art directing the game b/c in the end this is his game, more than it is ours. I feel like the style we're going for is a 60% good lookingness (up from 10%). Basically crank this shit out and move on to what I really want to do, but make them good enough to re-work/re-use later. While I can write HLSL I don't care enough to do that to make this game even better. Its going to be good enough ...then back to Unreal.
I'm not in love with this idea, me working on this project, but I think its smart enough to see what working with Andrew is like, and its only logical to get someone of talent on the same page/team. He's a great developer, works a lot on his own projects after hours. I know lots of talented guys but many have long since burned themselves out working on their own projects. I think small teams are the only way to make a living as an indie developer. Each person is so key that you're really investing in each other if you choose to work with someone.  So I'm learning a lot about better more efficient content creation methods, only making me better more ready for the future projects.
Make ship, neeext, make ship neeeext...