Green Territory - What's Next

Alright folks, time to talk about our future.

Green Territory’s core prototype has gathered enough feedback and showed enough interest from the community to convince me that it’s not a stillborn game idea, but something that really has a potential of becoming an interesting project. But then again it all depends on how (and if) I manage to pull this off.

But what is important is that I decided to continue with this project. The core prototype will remain the same, of course, but in meantime I will start working on the second prototype, which is not even a playable thing.

The second prototype is a scene mockup in Aseprite. That is a full screenshot of a finished game, including UI and whatnot, but without actual game.

“Why would you do that?” you may ask. And the reason for this is assessing my risks. Same as the first (core) prototype was created to assess the risk of the core gameplay not being interesting or fun, this prototype exists to answer a dreadful question: Can I draw good graphics for my game?

It is important, because without flashy graphics nobody will even click on your game, even if it has the best gameplay ever created by a human being, and ultimately nobody will know that your game even exists.

But ability to create good graphics isn’t an easily acquired one. I had a significant number of projects in the past that were abandoned because I couldn’t make myself to do the graphics. And without proper graphics everything else is meaningless as nobody is going to play your game. So projects were abandoned, one after another.

This time I have this mockup screenshot prototype that serves the role of protecting me from the risk of abandoning project because of the graphics. Of course there is a billion of other potential reasons for me to abandon a project, but inability to force myself to make graphics is by far the most common one. I like writing code. I like designing data structures, systems, making them work together, refactoring and optimizing stuff. Drawing? Not so much.

Drawing a full, fleshed, and polished screenshot of a potential game will definitely take some time (especially for me), but I had to do this in order to go forward without further hesitations.

See you when I have some results,
The Game Is Simple