What went well

The right tool for the job

I never worked with a game engine before, so I spent the first few months trying out Unity and Godot, going through tutorials and tried to get a sense of two things:

how comfortable do I feel using the tool

will the tool support certain features out of the box (tiled maps, 2D sprites, random generation, etc.)

In short I spent roughly three months trying stuff around before deciding to use Godot.

Don’t hesitate to spend time on decisions that have long-term impacts. Picking an engine is one of them.

Organise your work as if you are part of a team

Some people might question why, when you work on your own, you should keep track of all your work. But to me the real question is what level of granularity you should choose.

I’ve used two tools to organise my work during these two and a half year:

Google sheets, to keep a high level view of features / systems to develop

/ systems to develop Trello, to detail every of these features / systems into small tasks

Trello has been of great help and I’ve used it extensively (creating more than 1000 tasks — more than one per day on average). To me it was important to have three levels at which I can look at the work:

Feature level: by having all features listed in one place, it was easy for me to prioritize them according to the value it would provide to players

Task level: by splitting every feature into task, I could easily know what I would work on for the next two to three weeks

Transverse level: by labelling every task, I could easily progress on many things at the same time (code, design, graphics, etc.)

Not only did this helped me but it also helped the people I hired to keep in sync with the project.

My Trello by the release of Fantastic Creatures. There was more columns before.

Break down your work into small tasks, the feeling of accomplishment is very useful to keep motivation up!

Keep track of your design ideas

I used two ways of tracking my design ideas for the game: a Moleskine notebook and a wiki (I hosted on a local server). Both of them server different purposes:

I used my notebook whenever I travelled / couldn’t have my laptop with me. I went to many inspirational places like museums or libraries to gather ideas for both the theme and gameplay of the game and I now cherish this notebook that has so much knowledge in it!

The wiki was an attempt at keeping track of all data in game (HP of units, movement points, etc.) but ended up failing its purpose as it became too hard to maintain. It however did prove very useful to the designer and composer I had to hire as it was an easy reference for them to learn about the game!

Notetaking even during holidays!

Having different medium to capture my ideas was really helping in the creative process. If you have actually more ideas, I’m all ears! I’m currently testing Notion.

Release early, release frequently

I started the coding of Fantastic Creatures in January 2018. I made the game available to alpha testers in January 2019. Since then I’ve released more than 37 versions of the game. It was incredibly valuable to have real players trying the game and giving feedback. Here’s a breakdown of the different steps:

Alpha in January 2019: contacted friends and groups of 4X players through Discord and reddit. Ended with 10/15 people trying the game who all had background in 4X games and were not lost with the rough UI at the time. This first contact confirmed that the game was heading in the right direction and highlighted many areas of improvements (UI, pollution, pace, etc.)

Beta in August 2019: extended the invite through the same channels but also players with less experience and family. This was helpful to verify things like balance of the tutorials, as well as the difficulty.

By releasing frequently I also discovered countless bugs that I managed to fix before the release.

An overview of all the releases of Fantastic Creatures.

I’ve also asked all testers to join the Discord channel of the game, allowing them to provide and discuss feedback together with felt very constructive and built a little community around the game.

We have more than 50 users on our channel!

Releasing early allowed me to verify the game was playable, release frequently allowed me to improve the game based on other opinions than my biased one.

30 minutes a day

Probably the most important advice I would give when asked about how to keep motivated and finish a game: make sure you spend some time EVERY DAY on your game. No break, no day off, period (well, apart from sickness really).

Let me expand a little bit on how it helped:

First of all, spending time on your game every day will make sure you never have that tempting pause where it gets very hard to get back to it. You keep the ball rolling and it never stops.

Your focus is always “fresh”, as you’ve only last worked on something the day before. You won’t need time to “get back to it”.

I find it more efficient to spread the work load across the week, rather than only doing short burst of works. It feels a way more sustainable way of delivering in the long term.

Of course you will have days where you just don’t want to launch your favorite IDE. And that’s fine, there are many peripheral activites you can do that still counts: drawing ideas, watching gamedev videos, working on your marketing, taking care of your twitter, getting in touch with other devs, attending meetups, etc.

Obviously that rule worked for me and it might not for you. Maybe 5 of 6 days a week will work better. But the key takeaway is that developing a game as a solo indie dev is a marathon, not a sprint. And you’ll need that stamina to get into a sustainable rhythm during years. Spreading out your working hours as much as possible will help you achieve that.

Finally I’ll just add one thing: I manage to change my day job to work four days a week, around halfway through the development of Fantastic Creatures. I only used that as a day to focus a few extra hours on the game, for these deep technical challenges that would require time to go through. But that would only mean between 4 and 6 hours of extra work on that day. The real chunk of work was still done every evening, Monday to Sunday.