I realised a little while ago that I was doing jams, scoping games, getting them built, and questioned why I wasn't doing it fully outside of the jams.
Here's the conclusions I made:
- When I do a jam, whether I'm working otherwise or not, the deadline allows me to think about it as I would an actual job. I set time aside in my day or week to work on the discrete tasks to get the result of a playable build by the end of the jam. Multiple factors define how much time I can afford and how much work I can actually do, so the work is scoped around that.
- In a jam, the objective is to get a playable build and get it submitted. While I aim for at least a reasonable level of quality, the final quality of a submission is not as important in a jam as actually getting a build out. This results in my being able to be more forgiving of myself when it comes to what I am happy to consider as "good enough". Outside of a jam, my definition of "good enough" tends to be based on what I would expect as a quality standard if I was to choose to buy or play a game, most of the fun to play and "good" quality games can have a financial cost attached to them, and while it might be unrealistic to expect to be able to match that quality on my own, there is a point, I hope, at which I will be able to think to myself that my own work is "good" enough for me to consider asking others to pay for it.
- While uploading games to itch for game jams, or even just because I make something I want to share, is simple and easy, the potential of turning those projects into a revenue stream on itch is limited without a lot of extra effort in advertising a project through other sources and mediums. This means that, if I want to consider trying to make money, I would need to use other market places to increase sales potential, and those market places will have differing requirements on build quality. Regardless of the market place, there would still need to be advertising and marketing to build a sales footprint, and it seems to be becoming more of a defining factor in the success of a game as more and more games are being released on various platforms making it more difficult to stand out because of quality alone.
- From experience, I can also say that there is a lot more work required to get a game uploaded to some market places, and that it requires handling business and legal documentation to prove to the market place that your game is appropriate for them to sell on their platform. Not many devs or dev youtubers seem to talk about these steps, likely because they don't draw people in, but if you want to progress outside of the jams, it is work that needs to be done, eventually.
- When it comes to scope and time, I find the act of making a game needs to be treated like a job, with discrete tasks that can be managed and tracked. The effort made in organising the work keeps you on track and allows you to monitor your progress. You don't need to define a full scope or timescale at the start of a project, but as you work through a project you can then refine the scope to what you need, and refine your overall timescale based on the experience you gain by working through a project.
- Reviewing your current position in a project is useful to plan out the next steps, figure out unknown elements in need of investigation, identify gaps or bloat, and get an idea of how much is left to actually do.
- The business and legal stuff at the end can be boring, complicated, and time consuming. It is not normally as simple as: finish build, upload, people play, win. Itch really spoils us with this.