For the longest time it seemed like I could never find time to work on my projects. There was never enough time in the day to do all the things I wanted to do. It’s frustrating. It wasn’t that I was particularly busy, but I always was looking for the perfect combination of decent span of time and a good amount of inspiration before getting started. Well, I found that this doesn’t happen often.

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This is a simple and well known idea, but it’s really easy to forget. Our work usually tends to pull us in deep into the details. But remind yourself to step back. Don’t try to do everything perfectly right away. If you project has lots of moving parts—and most games and projects do—you’ll need to work on a little bit of everything. Just shape the thing you’re working on and then move on to the next thing. Quality is not the first goal. You want to get as complete of a picture of your project elements as fast as possible.

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If you are like me, you’ve probably started and stopped countless prototypes and side projects. Maybe something got too difficult or complex. Or it just wasn’t turning out like you imagined. There are lots of reasons to leave a project behind.

It’s not a bad thing. It’s efficient to abandon things that aren’t working out. You might come back around to these ideas. Some ideas need time. One thing is certain. You definitely learned something from working on all those projects, and you’ll bring that with you to the next one.

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We carved out the first two weeks to focus on concept ideation, pencil sketching, and to develop prototypes of the core idea in Unity. We want to keep focused on building concepts that are feasible to launch within our established time frame, but its really beneficial to dedicate some time to exploration. So we are taking these early weeks to go wide— to stretch the idea of sitting as a core mechanic into something fun, maybe something unexpected. Continue reading…

Ok, so this isn’t really day 0 (actually I’m also writing this a month and a half late). We started exploring the idea of designing a simple game we will actually release* a few months ago. This was inspired by an article from Chris Zukowski here. The article told us that games are hard, so make something easy. And just because platformers are only running and jumping, doesn’t mean that is easy. Continue reading…

Years of writing down new ideas. Sketching characters and drafting design documents. Learning the tools and process. Making prototypes and abandoning them. Whatever roadblock seemed to creep into the game production, there was always something that seemed to come up and keep us from sharing what we created with the world. Here’s a short list of roadblocks that come to mind: Fear of failure Technical hurdles Seeking perfection Taking on too much Working in isolation Making it ‘complete’ Being ‘too busy’ Losing belief in the idea With design being our day job, you’d think we’d bring everything we’ve learned into this new journey to create a game. Continue reading…