If there’s something I learnt from making my previous adventure game Something Fowl Afoot it’s to set realistic goals. I actually started writing that game over 10 years ago as a quick free time project and ended up sinking thousands of hours into hand drawn animation, coding and narrative which over it’s lifetime was ported and rewritten in at least 2 different engines and languages.

It was a painful realisation the day I decided to set it free that I’d lost control of it and couldn’t even properly bug test it anymore. It had got out of control and to this day I still wish I could fix it’s problems and release it.

Everyone I’ve ever followed in the indie game community says the same thing.. SET REALISTIC GOALS but nobody (including me) ever listens.

The problem is many of us are perfectionists and we want the thing we’re creating to look, play and sound as good as it can, we dream big, we aim high.. and that makes the fall more painful when it inevitably comes.

The honest truth is with a busy fulltime job, family life and two stupid dogs to entertain, you have to reign in your ideas… just a little.

So this time I’m approaching things a little differently…

Firstly I’m using UNITY, something I’ve been using professionally in my fulltime job for years. It’s an engine and a language (C#) that isn’t going away, with great bug testing tools and addons to speed up the development time.

Secondly, this time I’m not creating the graphics from scratch, I’m leveraging on the incredible skills of the larger UNITY community and paying some of those talented content creators for their brilliant models and then adapting and editing them myself, making a few bespoke special things on the way.

This means a new graphical style which is a departure from my usual hand-drawn method from my previous games like Fantasy Quest, but I’m really pleased with the way things are looking a few months in.

So here I go, promising myself not to aim too high, not to dream too big.

Wish me luck 🙂