Devlog 0 - Planning?!

I’ve worked with Unity while being employed in games and in other industries. On my own though, I only did game jams: I’m a hobbyist solo developer.
Now I have just set a goal for myself: to release a game next year. It will be a roguelike, where you defend yourself against hordes of enemy spaceships by building turrets that attack on their own.

Old habits

In game jams, as soon as I have the slightest idea of what I want to do, I start developing it.
As I already had a good understanding of the game I wanted to make, I started right away with a prototype. To test what? I didn’t know.
After losing two week trying different engines I finally came back to Unity. Not because it was better or anything, but simply because I was more proficient with it.

Emerging questions

When building a game jam game, some game design questions might emerge. I usually answer them without too much of a thought: it’s a game jam game after all, we are here to try.
While working on the prototype I found the same questions were much more difficult to answer: I was not ready to lock myself in a choice.
While, in fact, making such decisions is what a prototype is for. After realising that, I write down all the possible choice, then try one. If it’s not good I come back to the list and try another.

Planning

One major downside of this method is: you don’t know when to stop!
heartbeast wrote about this issue in Production Point and talked about it in a short video. One interesting point is that you don’t want to plan during the prototyping phase because you’ll likely make a inaccurate estimation of what needs to be done. While this resonate a lot, I still need to deliver something next year, so I better not stay in this phase for too long. I ended up by adding only one item to the calendar: leaving the prototyping phase in September.

Wish me luck!