My first full week where game development took a back seat. That gave me plenty of time to think about the state of my progress to this point.
Where I’m at
The conveyor game is essentially on pause for a little while I re-evaluate my direction.
I’ve started a new game concept that sticks with an even simpler premise.
What I Planned
My plan was to continue developing the data structure and UI for my conveyor game, link the two parts together (that’s the hard part) and figure out if the game is actually more fun, or if I need to look elsewhere for the interesting part of the game.
What Actually Happened
I’ll start by explaining that while I’m pursuing this game development journey, it’s not something I can dedicate every waking hour to, which is probably just as well. This week, I found myself busier with my ‘day job’ more than normal. This itself is fine and I accepted that weeks like this one will happen – where other tasks take up most of my time and I don’t get much left to work on game development.
While I was working, I had quite a bit of time to reflect on my journey so far. In one view, I feel like I’m made some measurable progress is some areas (particularly, using Blender and learning how to model) but I also feel like I’m falling into the same trap as before, getting too invested in a concept before it’s really mapped out well enough.
Right now, I’m eight weeks in. That’s not so far, really, but still I feel like I’ve done about two weeks worth of work, and the rest of the time I’m spending redoing the same parts, or thinking so broadly I cannot turn the ideas into concrete results.
Several weeks ago, I purchased a number of courses from gamedev.tv. It seemed like as good a time as any to go through the one named Indie Game Success Roadmap. The course covers some general rules and roadmaps for three different stages of game creation, what you should be doing and when, etc.
It seems, to me, that the game has, through the iterative prototyping process, outgrown its purpose and become more than a simple starter game. There’s a handful of other reasons too, but mostly for this one, I have decided to park the project for the time being and go back to simple again. I’ll revisit this concept when I’ve learned more about the game-making process.
So now what? Well, I need to go more basic. I’ve found through the previous project that my preferred genre is simulation and management style games. So I have a much better basis in which to start putting ideas together. And timescale too – I’m aiming for around the 1-2 month mark to get something quick and messy put together and released, just so I have something “out there”.
How about a market stall game? Buy and sell fresh fruit and veg? Seems simple enough, as long as I don’t overcomplicate things, I should be good. Feels like a good place to start to though!
What Went Wrong
I think that perhaps I’m being a little too jumpy and reactive, and I’m very cautious about making knee-jerk reactions. I don’t want to bounce off too many different projects and end up with none of the complete in 6 months time. Maybe this is just the process and how it goes – just that many people don’t really go over this kind of experience, so who should know. Still, I’ll stick out the current path and see where it leads.
What Went Right
The course definitely helped to focus my attention towards the process as a whole. It let me feel confident of the loose feeling that the conveyor project was drifting somewhat and lets me correct that action before I spent weeks working on a fuzzy idea.
What Next?
Next week, I plan to get the general design of the game figured out. It’s about as simple as it can get, so I don’t expect this to take too long. Once I have this part thought out well enough, I’ll work on some early (and quick) prototyping.