Game Development
Game development. Who ever said it was going to be easy.
As many of you who keep up to date with the development Gym Empire are aware. It has been a good few months since any regularity in the Gym Empire progress updates. There are a number of reasons behind that. Partly the type of development that has been going on. Partly family priorities kicking in. And partly being distracted with other adventures.
The problem however is that it has been niggling at me that I am not being anywhere near as interactive with you guys as I need to or intended to be when I started developing Gym Empire. My intention has always been to keep you all up to date with game development weekly through this blog. And to interact with you all daily via the Discord.
YouTube Channel
Recently, I’ve been adding a new avenue of interaction through YouTube.
Initially I started the Chronik Spartan Gaming channel a couple of years ago. Before I even started development of GLO. However it was difficult to find the time to dedicate to making content for the channel. A year later I started uploading videos again following the journey of my game collecting. Not related to the game development at all. It was about 3 months before I realised the game collecting videos were not getting much attention. Plus they were distracting me too much from developing Gym Empire.
It was late last year that one of my Twitter friends and couple of friends in the Discord server mentioned they missed the game collecting videos. At this point I decided to revive the Chronik Spartan Gaming channel and start producing more content. However, I decided to do things a little differently. The plan was to start making videos again about retro gaming. But to also extend to current gaming, indie games and simulation management games. The way I see it we are all one big community of gaming fanatics spread out across many different social media outlets.
My primary focus is game development and the development of Gym Empire. However by sharing my love of gaming in all its different forms. I hope to grow a community that can share with us the development of Chronik Spartan Games. The intent has always been to build a community that is interested in the games I make. However it’s about more than selling games. It’s about sharing this amazing journey with as many likeminded people and building something amazing together. Building a new outlet for gaming related content through YouTube is another way to expand the reach of Chronik Spartan Gaming.
Community Interaction
A new baby, a new demanding day job and building a YouTube channel. These things all add up to a lot of time taken away from direct game development.
Family will always remain to be my priority. Words cannot express how proud of my family I am. They are my number one greatest achievement. However, I must admit I had greatly under estimated the stress and impact of having a second child. Whereas once I could wake up at 5am and start game developing. I am struggling to catch up on months of bad sleeping. Meaning my morning development has taken a hit.
I started a new job at the end of last year. And although it gives me a much better work life balance. It also means that while at work I am so mentally occupied it doesn’t allow for much time to plan out my game development activities. I hadn’t realised how much planning I did in my head until I wasn’t able to anymore. That makes it increasingly difficult to hit the ground running when I get a spare 30mins for game development.
On top of all of this. Adding the task of building a YouTube channel to the whole mix of game development activities adds a whole new level of work to come to terms with. The channel serves as a new way to interact with huge portion of the gaming community who focus predominantly on YouTube. To introduce to them myself as a gamer and as a game developer. My intent with the Chronik Spartan Gaming channel is to focus more on the gamer side of my personality. YouTube in itself is an art form that requires time and dedication to understand and to improve at. Much more time and dedication that I had anticipated. The past few months have seen me finding a voice and style for the channel. Whilst improving and speeding up my recording and editing abilities. Some videos have taken me up to 8 hours to produce. This is 8 hours I would have spent otherwise game developing. However I truly believe it is worth it…
Expanding The Community
The benefit to building the channel is to increase the awareness of Chronik Spartan Gaming. Along with that is the ability to interact with an even wider community. A community we can interact with about all things gaming. But equally who will be able to provide input and ideas into the development of Gym Empire. And other Chronik Spartan Games. As well as help to spread the word.
The impact of being able to let more people see Gym Empire. Is that it will help it become a better game and ultimately more successful. It is with that success I am hoping to be able to move to full time game development and community building. Meaning I will be able to spend a full 8 hours a day extra on development. That alone will bring exponential growth and improvements to the development of Chronik Spartan Games.
However we’re not there yet…
Time Management
We are still in a place where development and community building has to coexist with my day job. Therefore I need to find ways to make everything work the best is can. Over the past few months some things have gone really well, whilst other haven’t.
What’s Gone Well
In terms of building the Chronik Spartan Gaming channel. I am really excited about the community that is being built around it. Equally I am happy with the current growth the channel has had. It’s not exploding by any means. But the channel is growing much better than it did when I started a couple of years ago. A large part of that is my increased understanding of how to interact with YouTube. But also understanding SEO more clearly.
With regards to video production, as with most new endeavours, the initial learning curve was steep. However, I am finding ways that greatly speed up production. Meaning I am freeing up more time to go back into game development.
As far as game development goes. I have been facing my toughest challenge so far. What started out as initially the save load system. Quickly grew into a mammoth task of rebuilding some of the foundations of the game. Although it has taken quite some time. The progress in rebuilding the systems has been really successful and makes for a much stronger foundation for the game. These issues would have always been found and resolved. However finding them earlier makes it much easier to handle them. Rather than later on when much more of the game would have been developed.
What’s Not Gone Well
The amount of raw time dedicated to game development has suffered in the past couple of months. This is largely to do with a huge shift in my daily pattern. Making it difficult to plan when game development could occur. However in the last week the dust has really started to settle. I am now able to better plan game development. The one area that needs a big improvement is getting back into the 5am wakeups. This was when I had some of my most productive game development. And is big on my list of things to change over the next couple of weeks.
Despite building the YouTube channel. I feel my community interaction has been woeful. There are a few reasons behind this which I plan to tackle head first in the next couple of weeks.
Firstly I haven’t provided any weekly updates for quite some time. This is because I didn’t want to bore you all with repetitive posts around rebuilding some of the Gym Empire systems. However I’ve realised there so much detail involved in the development. Even if the I am stuck on the same task week to week there is still a lot to discuss with you all.
Secondly I have not interacted nearly as much as I should on Discord. I had quite a few ideas when I started the Discord channel. However I was focusing too much on fancy ideas that ultimately didn’t provide much to you as a community. In the near future I will streamline the Discord server. From now on I will be focusing on keeping it simple with genuine honest day to day interaction. I am open to all input regarding the Discord server. And happy to provide permissions any of you who want to help build the sever into the amazing community hub it plans to be.
Finally, the YouTube channel has probably not been as interesting for those of you that are with me purely for the simulation management indie game development side of things. From now on I plan to provide more content to the channel with regards to indie games and the development side of things. I have planned some new videos. And also I am considering the idea of a regular vlog to go alongside these weekly blogs. In order to give a different perspective of how development is going.
I am excited about how things are going and where they can end up. Let me know what you think!
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