A friend of mine from high school ended up in the game industry kinda by accident. He started his career as an illustrator, doing 3dsmax models that ended up in a textbook that a whole SHITLOAD of american schools ended up buying. From there he got hired by Lucasarts and reported directly to George Lucas, working on animation for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and a few other projects. He wrote the water ripple algorithms and modelling for Beowolf (watch it again, it's pretty damn good). Anyways, just before Lucas sold the Star Wars name to Disney, my friend quit and went out on his own - moved back to Canada and developed this game from scratch. He did all the programming himself, his wife did the artwork, and a friend of theirs did the music. Not only that, he made all the code platform portable - There is a Linux native version on the Ubuntu Software Centre. Anyways, the Windows version is also on Steam right now for 50% off - It's a fun little platformer side-scroller/puzzle game. Not going to win any awards for amazing cutting-edge graphics or particularly inventive gameplay, but it's fun as shit to play, I must say.
Check it out, it's freaking $2.49 FFS. For less than a Venti dark roast you can have 8 months of someone's hard work:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/10420 ... 1_7_15__13 
I do not get any commission for this, I can pass along your comments if you like though.