There has in fact been some planning to Iron Village’s development. The first major milestone is coming up, what I have named the “Prototype”. I don’t know if it fully fits the definition of a prototype, but it’s basically the first build I’ll be making available to gather feedback. It has all the mechanics, and the basics of gameplay implemented. The game-breaking bugs should be sorted out, but other bugs will definitely be in place.
The original goal was to get something done earlier, as a very bare bones prototype – basically, get the idea out in front of people to determine if there’s a decent game idea here, and get feedback as early as possible so it’s easier to pivot if needed. It’s been a bit of a bigger task to get here though – about 2-5 months depending on how you measure. (I was sporadically working on this starting in September 2023, but ramped up starting in January of this year.) So why did this end up taking longer?
- Learning Godot. Obviously it’s going to take some time to learn a new engine, and changing languages partway through definitely didn’t help. Still, I don’t think this took up a huge chunk of time, Godot was fairly easy to learn – of course, I do have prior Unity experience, which really helped.
- City builders have lots of mechanics. Again, this should be expected, city builders in some ways are about having a bunch of different mechanics, and playing around with how they interact. For the prototype, this should just be the minimum set of mechanics. I actually got the main mechanics done back in January, the main one that was missing was a way to have more trains come in – it’s not exactly much of a game if you run out of a way to get more gold or people. In fact, it still hasn’t been implemented 😅.
- Art, Sound, and Polish. From what I’ve seen, the best practice is to not have too much art implemented early, especially if the scope or requirements change. While there’s definitely art here that needs work (mostly the trains that I made myself, the buildings and terrain were assembled from Minifantasy assets that are already great), I definitely put a lot of time into making assets better than “programmer art”.
Anyway, I’ve been aiming for a February 29th release of the prototype to gather feedback – and I think I’m on track, but I’m off on vacation next week (no dev diary then), so it’ll be close. Next steps kind of depend on what sort of feedback I get, if there’ll be more public prototypes/betas/etc, but there’s a pretty solid amount of additional content I’m planning on adding, and of course bugs to fix too.
For now, here’s some more screenshots:
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