A week ago, I finally finished another prototype. There was a problem though... It was worse than the last one. I was confused. I took a moment to look through my old prototypes and I realized something: they've been in steady decline of quality. This devlog, I'll be talking about why this happened and what I'm doing next.
A Theme
I think one of the most important things a game must have is a good theme, something everything else will revolve around. The theme of my game is something very important to me, the reason I'm making this game and not anything else. The problem was that, like any thing you truly feel, it's hard to put what exactly my theme is in words. But slowly, I've managed to nail the essence of what I want to say in Fountain of Life, and I've been working with that. There's something I haven't mentioned though... I managed to nail the theme sometime in March, a good while after I started the original prototyping. What does this mean? One important thing in particular: what I had in mind for my game before I defined my theme is different than what I have in mind now.I made the first couple of prototypes with a certain intention, with a certain idea of what I wanted it to be like in the end. But after that, my vision for the game became clearer; and the new vision turned out to be very different to what I had envisioned before. What did I do, then? A mistake I didn't realize until now: stripping away elements. This is not inherently bad; in many cases, it can make the game better. The problem though, is that I was taking away the elements that made my game fun in the first place, and trying to replace them with boring secondary mechanics. This explains why the newer prototypes are less fun than the original ones.
What next?
Throw everything to the trash and start again. This isn't anything particularly special, though. It's fairly common in game development to have to throw away things you worked a lot on. Why am I being so melodramatic, then? I guess it's because it's the first time I've ever truly done something like this. When I switched from Game Maker to Unity I said I was going to throw away what I had but what I ended up doing was just transforming it. This time, I'll actually make something that's completely new.
Throwing away 6 months of prototyping isn't easy, particularly when I only have 6 months left to finish 88% percent of Fountain of Life's preproduction (this is a self imposed deadline, though). I'm going to take things slowly this time (well... in a way) and actually think about what I'm doing instead of just trying out the first thing I come up with. I bet I could have avoided all this if I had stopped to think about 2 moths ago. As way of saving time, I'll try doing paper prototypes, a type of boardlike version of my game. I've also decided to write a devlog every month starting from now, to really think about what I'm doing.
Last thing: I made a little video showing the changes in this first line of prototypes. You can see it at Youtube here: Youtube.com
