Well, a game to be exact, and one that can be played with just a browser to top it off. Since I’m not a programmer, I was lucky to have friends capable of doing all the things I was imagining for my perfect game. You might say that a game is hardly something that would fit as personal development, and you might be right, but sometimes you just want to have some fun and test your skills against others. If you consider that this game is also a business, and not done just for fun, then you might understand that I’m working on my future.

We started with no clue on what a game might mean and how we should approach it, so we just dived right into it, writing down our ideas and giving them to the programmers as we thought of them. A lot of mistakes were done this way, and many can be linked to real life and personal development. I’ll try to list both the good parts, and the mistakes we made along the way. There are no bad parts, because it is a fun experience and I learned a lot from it. It’s been 9 months since we started working on the game, and there are still 3 months until we finish it, so the learning process hasn’t stopped yet.

The Best Parts

• Team Work. Even as we worked mostly over the Internet, working together on a project like this builds a special bond between those involved. I’ve made two new friends this way and I expect to make many more once the game is finished.
• Knowing that it’s all done by your hands and molded from your ideas makes for a rewarding experience as you see it grow and slowly crawling towards being finished.
• The things you learn. This is my first start-up and I’ve learned a lot by researching and thinking outside the box. As I prepare for the official launch of the game, I’m learning about web marketing, client support, advertising, hosting, domains, promoting online and offline, writing press releases, learning to use the power of social bookmarking, search engine optimization for forums, link building, monetization, and the list continues. I learn something new every day and I’m a much better person now then I was a year ago thanks to this game.
• Learning to think outside the box. Perhaps the best thing that I’ve learned from this project is to think outside the box, innovate, taking every single bit and analyzing it, trying new and better ways to do it. What most don’t realize, is that in a game, like in life, there is always one other way to skin a cat (you know what I mean). Every single action in a game can lead to other actions or it can influence the strategy of the game in some way. Thinking of every possible scenario and analyzing the consequences makes you drop some ideas, modify them or simply reaching something better as you think of it. It’s the same in our every day life. The way you usually do things isn’t always the best way.
• Ask others for opinions. More then once I’ve had an idea that I thought was perfect for our game but turned out that it would’ve been bad if implemented. By talking with my friends I saw the parts that weren’t so ok about it or how it would open the game for tactics that weren’t fair. You can’t always think on the best course of action. Having someone that you can talk about it makes it much more easier to come up with great results. Just remember, don’t just take everything others say and assume it’s best. They too can make mistakes, so analyze what they say and compare it with your ideas. You can choose the best course of action based on a more complete picture this way.
• Self Confidence. Learning to think outside the box and evolving every day, learning new things and seeing that I’m capable of planning a very complex game, learning to take decisions and to analyze a course of action, all these brought a big boost to my self confidence. I know now that I can do anything I set myself to do. Another boost was the fact that I was capable of writing down 3 pages full of ideas on how we can promote the game once it’s launched. Do things that you’ve never done before, learn new things, reach your goals, and self confidence will follow.
• Discipline. I’m not 100% there yet, but compared with the past I’m much more disciplined and capable to finish something once I start it. Working with people that depended on what I did to continue working on the game helped me a lot in this area. Getting over my laziness and doing what needed to be done is something that I’m much more capable of doing now then before.
• Learning that not all best things in life are free. Initially we were going to make our own graphics, and the result wasn’t exactly perfect since we didn’t have a dedicated designer. Taking the decision to spend some money and hire someone to do a perfect job with this was pretty easy once I discovered a game that made me sign-up just because I loved their design. Yeah, I liked it that much! Sometimes you just need to spend a buck to get the job done right. Being cheap and doing it yourself when you’re not up to it and you don’t have the time to learn how to do it, can really damage the end result and make you loose more money in the end.

The Mistakes We’ve Made

• Not having the full picture before we started. We thought of the initial idea, then when we found our programmers and we just started writing down the game and giving it to them to write the code. What we should’ve done is spend a month thinking and writing down every single aspect of the game. The beginning was chaotic and it’s still far from perfect as some minor parts of the game are just ideas at this point, even as the game is 3 months away from launch. Not having it all on paper, the programmers just assumed some things and did it how they thought it was logic. This led to going back and modifying the code when we saw how they did it, wasting time in the process. Before starting something big that involves a lot of time you need to do some brainstorming with the others, making sure everyone has the full picture before getting started.
• Setting unrealistic goals that led to disappointment. None of us had any idea on what a game implies so we’d initially set a goal of finishing the game in 3-4 months. 9 months have passed since then and we’re still not done. One of the reasons for this is that it’s all done in our free time, which is limited since the programmers have normal jobs. Also, there is a lot of learning involved when you’re doing something new, and that doesn’t just happen overnight.
• Not sticking to the KISS principle (Keep It Simple Stupid). Thinking outside the box too much can also be a curse if you don’t know how to pick just the best parts. So many ideas on improving the game and making it better made the game development take longer, and also made it a bit more complex. Hopefully it will still be a nice experience for those with little time to play, while giving the hardcore players something extra to do so they don’t get bored.
• Doing a bad job at explaining some parts of the game to the programmers. The battle system is one example of this. It took us 1 week and 8 printed pages to analyze every scenario and to come up with a battle system that is somewhat realistic and also fair. In the end, we failed to explain better a small portion of the system, and the programmer understood something else. Small error but ended up modifying the entire way the battle worked. It was remedied easily but it was time wasted anyway. Take your time to explain what you need to be done if you’re not the one doing it. It can save you serious time if you make sure the others know exactly as you see it happen.

Good or bad, it was a fun ride and it forced me to improve myself along the way. Take something you’ve never done before and learn how to do it. Something that you now pay for, something that would improve your blog or your life in some way, anything goes.

This post is part of the Middle Zone Musings group writing project What I Learned From…

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