Something I learnt whilst developing Glo, is that although a quick dev cycle is great for productivity, it is actually terrible for marketing. I believe that once someone becomes relatively successful then a quick dev cycle can work as marketing should be easier if you are more well known. However, for someone still starting out you need to allow more time to enable your audience to grow. For that reason I am happier to take on a bigger project which I predict will take between 6 months to a year to complete. In that time I intend to get a store page set up almost immediately and to make development even more transparent than the development of Glo. In fact I actually want this game to be build with a strong community interaction and for the community to really feel a part of the development of Gym Tycoon/Gym Empire (name still to be decided).
The key to building a good tycoon game is getting the maths and systems behind the scenes working in harmony and balanced to be fun. With that being said I plan on using Unity for this project as I feel it is a better fit than GameMaker Studio and will enable me to code in C#. I’m very comfortable with C# and instantly I had an idea of where I would start coding a game like using C#. With the systems being the absolute most important part of this game I intend to focus purely on building these in the beginning with the most basic UI just to give me the absolute minimum required to test those systems. I’ve in fact started with just a basic Windows Forms setup.
As I develop the systems further I will expand the UI just to the point where it gives me what I need from from a design point of view. These first few months of development will probably be quite dry from a screenshot perspective but it will give anyone interested a deep understanding in how the game will be built from the beginning. I hope for this to give the community a deep level of investment and as the UI develops further into a more attractive game over time for it to start to reach a larger audience. I also believe that this will give people the chance to understand the game deeply enough to provide input that can help us all to shape it over time.