When The Work You Do Makes a Difference

... and when it doesn't

I’ve been polishing my side project, Tic-Tac-Tanks, and it’s interesting because it feels like even the smallest amount of work drastically improves the game. This is contrasted by the fact that I’ve put hours and hours and hours into my main project, Demonlocke, over the past months and it doesn’t seem to be making any difference at all.

This worries me that the problem is the kind of game I’m making. Maybe the scope is still just too much for me? Or maybe I’m just focusing on the wrong areas of the game? Maybe I’m focusing on those areas because they have issues. Maybe the real problem is that the design of Tic-Tac-Tanks is mostly figured out (with some tweaking here and there for balance and variety) where the design of Demonlocke still needs work.

I’ve had an intuition lately that nailing the design work in a project early on is crucial as a solo dev or small team. My experience working on Tic-Tac-Tanks has strengthened this intuition. You just don’t have the time to rewrite code with each major design change.

Thanks for reading,
Ben

P.S. My partner and I just had a new baby! I took a break from posting here on substack but I’ll be posting again every Thursday.

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