I’ve recently been working on a a Roblox game that was incredibly exciting to me for the first few weeks. Then, in the past week, it’s felt stale, uninspiring, and hard to work on–or so I thought.
Then today I realized something crucial. There is a fundamental difference between the what and the how. The how you do something can be just as important as the what you do. I thought the work itself had become uninspiring, but I’m more confident how we’ve worked on the project was the issue. I worked alone for a few weeks before my partner began, so we were working on disconnected timelines with misaligned clarity on where we wanted the project to go. We were doing inspiring work in an uninspiring way.
Now, based off of this experience and previous games, we’re going to do two things differently. The first is we’re going to test games quicker. Historically, we’ve developed at a month and a half to two month pace per project. This isn’t necessarily slow, but its more than enough time to prove out whether or not the game is fun and has potential. I find it is too much time, such that paralysis by analysis creeps in, and answers are arrived at through overthinking and not through market feedback and data. The kind of time we’ll take is around 2-3 weeks.
Second comes how we work on projects. Here, direction and a sense of clarity is paramount. We may not know that traveling east is correct, but we want to believe in traveling east and both head in the same direction. If there’s doubt there’s uncertainty, and if there’s uncertainty the “iffy” creeps in and our games decrease in quality. We want to strive to wake up and feel completely aligned in where we’re going. To make that decision we still should think from all we have learned, ask friends and developers for feedback, and then make that decision with confidence. We might find out that east was the wrong direction, and that’s ok, because we ultimately arrived where we wanted to go.