I’ve been thinking this week about what is so different about developing Gym Empire, compared to Glo.
At first I thought it was all about the tooling. I thought that it was down to the fact that Unity is such a different tool to GameMaker Studio and that learning it was the reason that I am not progressing as fast through development of Gym Empire. But the more I thought about it I realised this can’t be the case as I developed Cute Cat Splat using purely code on my phone. If that isn’t one of the most challenging ways to make a game then I don’t know what it!
Then it dawned on me. It’s having a vision. Not just a vision of what I want the end product to be like, as I have a very clear vision of how I want Gym Empire to turn out, but having a vision of the road ahead. With Glo and Cute Cat Splat I have a clear path laid out in front of me of all the different steps to get to the end. With Gym Empire I’ve realised that path is a lot less clear and in some of the steps aren’t’ even laid out in my head yet. This is the issue, it’s almost impossible to progress when you don’t know where your next step is and that makes it harder every time I sit down with an hour to spare.
I started off balancing Gym Empire and Project ZATO with an agile planning approach, but I can see now I have not put nearly enough details figuring out the main steps involved to get to the finish line. With Glo it was a lot easier as the project and smaller in comparison. With Gym Empire and Project ZATO the challenge is much greater so the effort in planning needs to match that.
With that being said, my next step is going to be to map out a clear path of milestones to the end for both Gym Empire and Project ZATO. That way it is going to be a lot clearer what I need to do and what I can do when I get my spare game dev time.
If you guys would be interested in seeing the plan/map then feel free to let me know in the comments. I’m happy to share any development information, I just want to make sure I don’t bore you with uninteresting stuff.