New Strategy
I'm wrapping up development on the first update of Revolve Ball, which means I'm also starting to look ahead to what I'm going to work on next. I'm also looking back, in order to gain some understanding about what problems I had with my previous project, and how to try to fix them.
The number one problem that I have right now is that I'm still treating game development as a hobby instead of as a (side) business. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, but if I ever want to go full time, it will be much easier if I have good development practices in place. Practices such as design documents and scheduling/deadlines. Part of the reason that Revolve Ball took such a long time to make was that I never had a clear goal from the beginning, just a vague idea that I kept adding to. Because of that, I never really set deadlines or milestones to keep myself on track for a quicker release.
Another problem that I've seen in both Revolve Ball and Nonogram Madness is that creating game content is very time consuming. It's possible to sit and tweak levels for hours, and since the "fun factor" of a level is kind of arbitrary, it's hard to know when to stop. Since I only get maybe one hour of development time every day, such time consuming tasks would be best cut out, if at all possible.
So, because of these considerations, I'm going to try a new two-month development cycle for my next few projects. These games will be smaller in scope, and won't require level creation. The basic timeline would look something like this:
- Two weeks - design document, wireframes, screen comps, icons
- Two weeks - music and sound effects
- Four weeks - programming and quality assurance
Seems pretty aggressive. However, I'd rather set a narrower schedule due to Parkinson's Law, which says that any task will take as long as the time limit you have to complete it. Since I'm still a novice game maker and am not anticipating any high sales for a particular game, my best strategy at this point is to focus on the $0.99 price point and ship, ship, ship. As always, I'll keep this blog updated with the results of my game makin'.
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