I’ve been working in games for a while now, to varying success. Did art for Fae’s Wyrd by PsychoAvatar, and for our next project as well. I haven’t been skimping on my other projects though, just developing a workflow. However, in the process of developing this workflow, I’ve picked up an important thing about doing your own game design.
Always find the simplest form of your idea. The simplest part, the simplest project, and work from there. That streamlined ultra-low level concept is about as much as your going to be able to make without the backing of a huge team, and it’ll usually be hard enough in and of itself. Now sure, if you have a few years to develop, you can eventually evolve that into something bigger, but it’s not just about how fast you can turn a project around. It’s about how well you can keep yourself motivated, and keep the ideas and concepts straight while your building it. Cargo moves from point a to point b seems like a really simple concept, but after a while you’ll be hip deep in queue structures, custom datatypes and various patches and streamlines of the system. Start working in a second area that has to have the same code work but isn’t really “about” that code and any breakages in your old code become confusing, and it’s hard to keep track of whats really working with the overall idea and what’s just implementation detail.
This is also why 20 page detailed design docs aren’t really a good show of your strength as a designer, in my opinion. It’s not what you ideally want, it’s what you can simplify the overwrought idea down into that matters.
Just a thought.