Thoughts about the last experience

Hello at the few that still look at the blog.
WARNING: long and dense post ahead

I decided I'll keep this blog and will not make a new one, I'll change the name in the future if blogger permit it.

Anyway after the last experience I'd like to share a couple of thoughts.

Thought number one: Start small
It's years that I try to make games (hentai and not), XMaker was the first one I publicized with the idea that having some people watching me, would help me keeping committed.
One of the main problem that I have is that I aim too big. This is a common problem that strike software developer (hence why you probably have already seen someone trying doing a game and stopping after a while).
XMaker is not that complex from the programming point of view, but required a lot of content to be written and drawn. At start I thought that I could just have shipped the game with low content and hope to other people to provide more (don't know if you noticed but inside the game folder there's a pdf showing most of the command available for writing the events).
When the project started I actually received a request from a very kind person who offered to write some events, but I refused because I wanted to make sure I shipped something first.

Thought number two: Ship often
I'm not sure this could be something feasible (expecially at the start of a new project), but shipping often should keep people engaged and probably less angry if the game fail.
Most of all it should provide a earlier feedback (hopefully) from the players.
The ship often methodology is often seen in kickstarter project that offer early builds.

Thought number three: Uhm, I thought I had more thought or maybe I simply forgot something...


As I anticipated I'm now working on a clicker game.
The game should have some properties that make it desiderable for me:
1. I like those kind of games
2. It should be fairly simple at least if I keep the scope small. In order to understand this I've started a small prototype to try understand what's easy and what's not. When I understand that, I should be able to start a game with an acceptable scope. (I'll post the prototype in the next days)
3. It require no writing skills (I have just to name things and in case describe them) and a small amount of draw (From what I understood at the moment I could draw an icon for every resource and an image for every unit, but the reality is that it would probably enough to provide art for the things that are hentai related...)


So my plan for the next weeks is:
1. Complete the prototype in order to understand some key point for designing the game.
2. Explain to you the mechanic behind the game, explaining it out loud should help me to understand the requirement for the game better.
3. Draw a simple mockup of the interface in order to visualize what could the final product look like.
4. Start working on the game, trying to ship weekly (probably hard) or biweekly a build. The build might be unplayable or with very limited functionality, the idea behind this is to show a constant progress.