In my last post, It’s been a while, I talked about how it’s been ~6 months or so since I worked on my unannounced game project. I’ve finally started working on it again, and I’m doing my best to overcome resistance. There are a couple things that are giving me pause with jumping back in:
- Thinking about my high-level plans for the game; what needs to be done before I make the Steam page live, what content should be in the demo, how marketing ties into it all, and how I prioritize everything when I’m doing this all by myself.
- Seeing the codebase and Unity project after time away. Not remembering all the little nuances of how systems are working individually and together.
To overcome these sources of resistance, the first thing I’ve done is create a document to list out all of my high-level considerations and put them in a rough timeline. I use Azure DevOps Boards as my project planning tool, so I went through and reorganized my list of Epics/Features/Stories to match the high-level doc, and I’ve also created a few new user stories to further organize myself and to just spend dedicated time refamiliarizing myself with the code and Unity projects.
From a psychological perspective, I’m trying to level set with myself. I tend to read a ton of content on how to market my game, gather feedback, run play tests, etc. I have a good idea of what all of these areas look like in a perfect scenario, and when I think of how much work/time it will take to achieve best practices in all areas I get very stressed because there’s no way I can do it all by myself in a reasonable time frame. I have to compromise – I either have to hire people (no budget) or partner with people (possible), take a longer time to get the game out (don’t want to do this), or just accept that not everything has to be perfect in every area!
The benefit I have is that nobody is depending on the game being successful – so if I don’t market it 100% how an established studio would, it’s ok. The important thing is that I’m enjoying this hobby and that I’m making progress/learning.