How to plan building your game as a solo developer
Building an entire game by yourself is intimidating, whether its 15 minutes or several hours. There are a lot of moving parts and dependencies when it comes to creating a game, and taking an organized approach broken into stages will help you avoid major time wasting pitfalls that threaten your progress.
Plot your ideas
The first thing you need to do is ruminate. Write down all your ideas about what your game could be, ask yourself questions about your game, and let yourself dream. This does two things. It 1: lets you explore new ideas for your game that may not have been front of mind right of the bat and 2: lets you discover early if your game is even worth making.
Spend at least a week ruminating, brainstorming and free-writing about your game. Ideally, spend more than a week. I can’t tell you how many games I have started making then quit when I was unhappy with the concept in actuality. It would have saved a lot of time to just cut these out early and avoid issues with core gameplay or story.
Get to prototyping
Now it’s time to build a prototype. This is where you figure out if the game you want to create is not only workable, but actually fun. Work on the prototype until you get something that makes sense and reasonably resembles your final goals. Then, get some folks to playtest your prototype. You need honest people who will really tell you the truth about if your game is fun or not, so generally finding strangers online is a good bet. If your game gets bad reviews, keep refining your prototype until it gets good reviews.
Figure out what you will be outsourcing and find your source
Maybe you need help with music. Or maybe art isn’t really your thing, but you want to have a game that stands out visually. Maybe there is certain code you need help building. Also, you will probably need play testers.
Whether its buying asset packs or hiring someone to create something custom to your game, it’s time to figure out where you want to find your outsourced work and determine a budget for it. If you can already get your order in, that’s great, but maybe you need to be further in your game before you’re ready for certain things. That’s okay, but being clear right off the bat when, who and how much money you are going to outsource will save you down the line.
Get to work!
It’s time to start grinding out content. This stage isn’t always fun, but it’s where your game actually comes to life. This stage needs to be totally separate from the prototyping stage — at this point, getting the content of the game coded is your only priority.
Optional: Look for funding
If you are looking for funding for your game, you’re going to need a solid vertical slice built out before your are ready to show your work to any potential investors. If this is you, the first priority of your content grinding phase is to build an amazing vertical slice. This can be used to create a crowdfunding campaign or go to game publishers. Funding is a whole other topic that I will try to dive into at a later time!
Begin QA and play testing cycles
Congrats on finishing your game! Now what I consider to be the worst part begins (sorry). I of course recommend performing quality assurance on your own game before you send it to another party to test — if you find low hanging fruit or easily spotted game breaking bugs right off the bat, you’re wasting your hard earned cash on getting someone else to spot these things.
But once you get get through the game without spotting any major tweaks to be made, getting someone else to QA and play test your game is vital. You will definitely have some bug blindness as well as some blindness to things in your game that are just not fun. Someone else can help you improve them.
How may rounds of testing you want to do is really up to you. This depends on your budget, your time you are willing to spend, and, to a certain extent, how good you want your game to be.
Publish your game
Time to publish your game to your perspective platform.
Your game doesn’t need to be perfect at this stage — any platform should allow you to publish new versions of your game as you make bug fixes and content updates. In fact, aiming for perfection is probably not the best. Getting actual live player feedback can help you hone in on what really needs to be fixed in your game. As long as the experience is good, there are no game breaking issues, and your game is polished enough to create a good feeling, you’re ready to go.
This article is a part of an ongoing project of daily video game mini essays. If you like the idea of getting these mini essays dropped directly into your inbox, I am cross-posting on Substack. You can subscribe here for free: https://howtogrowroses.substack.com/
If you want to learn more about me or my games, you can find my website here: https://www.heyitsamanda.com/
