Game development goes through phases.

There’s a discovery phase, when you are trying out ideas, to see if they will work. No matter how much you visualise how a game is going to work, it’s impossible to picture everything that happens until you have a prototype to test. Then you are trying to see if your ideas are as fun as you thought they would be.

It’s a choice how many new things you are trying. The more there are, the longer the discovery phase takes, as you try to prove all the new ideas. One of things that delays delivery is too many new things being developed at once. Against that, is the fact that innovation is needed, and lots of new things can make a game attractive.

Once you pass the discovery phase, and the basics work, you need to expand and flesh out the game. So then, you are creating the game enviroment, the background, the components that add to the realism of the experience. This is a more linear task, more predictable.

Not long after comes a crunch of activity. Now the picture is clear, you know what you are creating, and it’s just intense work to pull it all together, to add and add to the game.

— That’s the phase I am in now!