When to start my dev blog

[Rxanadu]

I've been developing a game for about a month, and I wanted to start talking about it. However, I wanted to start a dev blog to explain how I design different features in the game. Unfortunately, these features are all 'pie-in-the-sky' mechanics now; they haven't been implemented at this moment. My game's still in the prototype phase (i.e. cube prefabs make up the environment, basic player movement is set up), so I'm not confident enough to show off any screenshots of the game so far. 

 

As you can tell, however, a part of me still wants to go ahead and start talking about it. I know I'm being cagey about what my game actually is, and that's the problem. I want people to know more about what I want to put into the game (e.g. how I want to handle enemy AI and earning experience, what the player will be able to do through the game, how I'm handling death). Should I listen to my gut and talk about my development process, or should I keep quiet until I have something to show to the readers?

 

[Dewar]

Maybe you can start a thread in the game development forum here and show it off to Idle Thumbs folks for a little while until you're solid on your writing style and then transition to a public blog?

[clyde]

Personally, I don't have any interest in hearing about a game unless there is something (anything) playable. Of course, if a developer needs help figuring something out, that's a different situation. 

But it is not always about me (I know right?) If you want to start a development blog to get yourself to commit to the project more, then put something up where there are people you don't want to disappoint. This can sometimes backfire. 

I can't remember what your game-dev history is, but if you haven't published a playable anything before I strongly recommend starting a Glorious Trainwrecks account and putting your dev-log there. That community is so good at lowering the barrier of entry and the scope of expectation. I don't know if I would have ever gotten over that initial hump without them.

I'm not really sure what your reasons are for being cagey, so it's hard to give you solid answers.

[Rxanadu]

@clyde: I'm not at all sure what Glorious Trainwrecks is. From what I saw from it, the page looked like it fell out of the 1990s. I'm not sure if that's the right place for me to place my thoughts on my game. The main thing I'm looking for is some major feedback. I've actually been having a small conversation on YT (I know right?) about how to design roguelikes - a genre whose elements I wanted to integrate into my project. One of the people in my conversation actually helped me decide to include items reminiscent of the Bastion idols to improve a player's stats at the expense of increasing the difficulty of the enemies in the stage. I want more of this type of discourse, but I also want it to evolve from occasionally rambling on game dev forums. 

 

For the time being, though, I may have to go with @Dewer's solution and try my luck speaking about my game on Idle Thumbs' game dev forums. I took a look, and it seems like a good place to talk about my game without that much fear of feeling like I'm pushing it on anyone. Yes - I know of the whole plugging forums in the Idle Banter forums. I want to save that for later. 

 

I just want another way of unofficially talking about parts of my game without much fear. 

 

Edit: I just took a look at my avatar, and it still evokes how I feel about how little I know about game development despite working on this game for over a month. I dunno. It's just a thought.

[clyde]

The Idle Thumbs' game dev forums are an awesome resource especially for the type of feedback you are describing (and Unity troubleshooting). 

 

The reason I recommend Glorious Trainwrecks is because when I was trying to move from a playable mechanic like this to more of a complete-feeling experience like this, I struggled a lot. The reason I was struggling so much in retrospect is that I had no internalized understanding of scope when making games. I didn't understand what modularization was or why it was needed, so I was constantly making a single mechanic with lots of hopes about the world that I would eventually fill in around it. Doing it this way I kept getting overwhelmed by how much work it actually was to "fill in" the rest of the game. Glorious Trainwrecks has regular, extremely casual, game jams; ihavefivehat (a thumbs member) actually just hosted one throughout all of February. Once I started playing the games coming out of that community and participating in the monthly 2-hour game-jam, I started to finally get a sense of how to conceptualize a game that would take 2 hours, 2 days, 2 weeks, or 2 months. Your process may not be similar to my own, but when I finish any game (regardless of its scope) I can feel how much my game-making skills have improved. Then I can apply them to the next game. I get much faster with every game I make and so my capacity for larger scope is increasing every time I finish a game. I think the reason for this is that because development is so incredibly complex in it's amount of parts, it's really hard for me to remember how to do everything that is involved. For instance I'll forget how to turn an audio file into a 2d audio file in Unity because I haven't done it in so long. But once I made a bunch of small-scope, complete experiences, I gained a familiarity with each step of the minimal work-flow and then I could add in a sprinkle of learning how to do something new every time. 

 

I don't know why I keep assuming that this is your first game though, but even if it's not maybe it will help a lurker. 

 

What engine are you using?

[itsamoose]

I did a little dev blog for a while, but never managed to stick with it for more than a month or so.  I felt it really helped not necessarily for feedback, but as a way to keep myself honest.  Something about having to articulate what I had been doing really helped me focus and identify shortcomings.  Clyde's right in saying that you won't get much of any feedback until you have something playable--just getting the eyeballs over to your blog will be tricky enough let alone finding reliable play testers.  Even if you don't release it, I'd still recommend just writing something down at the end of every week as if you were presenting it to someone, even if its just a couple lines describing improvements, data integration, etc.

[Rxanadu]

I did a little dev blog for a while, but never managed to stick with it for more than a month or so.  I felt it really helped not necessarily for feedback, but as a way to keep myself honest.  Something about having to articulate what I had been doing really helped me focus and identify shortcomings.  Clyde's right in saying that you won't get much of any feedback until you have something playable--just getting the eyeballs over to your blog will be tricky enough let alone finding reliable play testers.  Even if you don't release it, I'd still recommend just writing something down at the end of every week as if you were presenting it to someone, even if its just a couple lines describing improvements, data integration, etc.

 

I do like the idea of writing one major paper talking about the improvements on my game. I can barely remember what I did the other day when working on the game, so writing something down saying, 'I did these things, and this is why' may help me out with processing what I want to do with my game. I tend write specific descriptions of changes when committing changes via SourceTree to my BitBucket project, so I could figure out some sort of small story to tell myself about my own development process. 

 

However, I tend to write things in lists, since I'm too scatterbrained to write things out in narrative format for too long. This sometimes makes writing things I've done down problematic, as it causes me to ramble about subject irrelevant to the piece.

 

I'll try at least write these small lists of things at the end of each week from now on. Thanks for the help. 

 

And, thanks, @Dewer for recommending the Idle Thumbs' dev forum.

[Dewar]

I posted on a podcast/news site for a while about my development process once. At first it was invigorating, but I started spending more time on the articles than the development after a while and the whole thing died.

 

Also, I was using programmer's art, so all my screen shots were just a bunch of lines and smileys.

[elvaq]

TIGSource is probably best if only in that the most visible is probably best. I would guess it's the most popular place overall. But there are also nicer places like Makega.me and as mentioned, Glorious Trainwrecks. Also dual-posting to Tumblr and maybe Reddit is a good idea, especially if you have lots of GIFs (you should have lots of GIFs)