Last weekend myself and Hayley followed up on a festive tradition we started last year. We booked a cottage in Wales and spent the weekend relaxing, eating lots and drinking mulled wine. It was an absolutely amazing weekend and a wonderful start to the festive period. Something else that stood out is that it was the longest period I’ve spent in the last 8 months not doing anything to do with game dev whatsoever. Not a line of code, not a note taken down and not a tweet sent. It was refreshing and relaxing. I guess I hadn’t realised how much time I spend on game dev in one way or the other.
Something else it has let me do is to take a step back and re-baseline my personal expectations. After building up so much momentum on Glo and learning GameMaker Studio pretty quickly, I assumed the learning curve for Unity would be the same. However in the last few weeks I’ve struggled as I don’t feel like I’m making the same kind of progress making Gym Empire in Unity as I am making Project ZATO in GameMaker. The thing is I’m not really allowing myself the time to learn Unity as a tool. Because I am comfortable with the code side of things and I have a level of confidence designing a game in GameMaker I have expected myself to be able to hit the ground running and get stuck into designing Gym Empire. Gym Empire is also a much more complicated game than Glo or even Project ZATO in term of the systems it uses. Those two facts combined mean that I feel I have been lagging behind my expectations of how quickly I should be progressing. In the 12 months of doing game dev this is a first for me.
Having had the time to take a step back and think clearly it’s made me realise though that I need to fair in my own expectations. A very important step in the development of Gym Empire is to fully understand the tool I am using to make it. If I don’t I could end up making mistakes that impact on the game itself. With Glo and Project ZATO I haven’t felt satisfied that I am progressing unless I make noticeable changes to the game each day. That is unrealistic with Gym Empire so I need to re-approach my expectations. What that means is that as I continue developing Gym Empire I am going to specifically allow and allocate time to learning the fundamentals of Unity to help the development flow more comfortably.
To enable focusing on learning Unity over the next month and also with the festive period upon us I will probably end up posting a little less frequently. To date I have always aimed to post between 3-5 times a week but this may drop to once a week. I just don’t think that writing about reading Unity basics is that much fun for you, I just want to let you know that and the reasons behind it in case you though I was maybe taking my foot off the gas. I will be certain to keep you up to date on any progress, interesting happenings or learnings that I think are beneficial to share.