1 year on

Hard to believe that it’s been a year since I announced the development of Age of Goblins or Byte56Game0 as it was known then :). While I’d like to be further along in the development, I’m pretty happy with where I’m at. There is plenty of little things I would have done differently, but there’s also no way I would have known. Now I do! Thus experience is gained. Only a few major things I’d do differently if I were doing it over again:

• Use a pre-made engine. I have spent so much time building the engine for AoG that I’ve spent far more time making the engine than I’ve spent on game play code. I started AoG with a goal to make the game I wanted and to learn along the way. Yes, it’s been interesting to learn the ins and outs of game engines, and I’m glad I have that experience. But I do prefer to be doing game development, not engine development.
• Use an entity/component system from the beginning. Going with this from the start would have simplified things quite a bit. The entity/component system is fantastic, and I wish I would have tried it out sooner. It took about three weeks to rebuild most of the functionality I had before into the entity/component system.
• Started with something simpler. AoG is a very complex game. For my first game I should have made something medium difficult in 2D. But I went full out with very in depth, 3D game. It probably would have been quicker to learn the mistakes I did if I was learning them with a simpler game :).

Of course the plan is to still continue development of AoG, that hasn’t changed. I just wanted to share some of my experience with those that may just be starting. The plan is to have a public alpha sometime this year. I only work on AoG part time, so the going is slow, but it’s going. I appreciate the feedback I get from fans, so let me know if there’s anything about the game you’d like to know. Thanks for reading.