Those explosions and particle effects look awesome, nice work.

Switching to prod is a big step. Are you sure you've been able to determine from your prototype that the game worked and was fun?

Could you describe the full game experience from the prototype alone?

From what I've seen, (and I've played the nov prototype) one can fire spells at their opponents, move units, and engage in combat (including archery) but the entire economy concept seems to be lost in the process unless I've missed that point, or it somehow evolved?

What have you toned down specifically to keep it coherent with your shifting finances? I'm curious about the thought process and inherent decisions taken there.

Also, regarding stockmarket, what did you invest in? I would assume not IT (so as to put your eggs in a different basket). My personal take would've been gemstones because they tend to return safe value over time regardless of market swings, unless you end up putting everything into bogus mining companies that "think" they found gold and turn up short.

Yeah, we realized that if we were going to spend any more time building the digital version of the prototype, it would mostly be wasted time (and come with an opportunity cost -- prototyping time eats production time!). It was just taking too long to get a good iteration cycle going. We couldn't fail fast enough. So I decided it would be faster and better to just use index cards on a table top to prototype the game play. I was partially correct. I sat down with my artist and we spent an entire day playing through the game campaign and participating in the tactical battles. It was fun to play and helped us see what the game should look like and how the core works. We also saw what parts needed some work and were able to make changes to the game play mechanics in a few minutes in notepad. If we had built the game in code, it would have taken a lot longer to implement the rule changes. What didn't work? Well, index cards and bits of paper are unwieldy to work with. It's easy to accidentally move something unintentionally. It's also computationally expensive to do the battles manually, so I spent a day writing up a battle calculator to reflect the game combat. All in all, we gained a pretty solid grasp of how the core aspects of the game should play. There are certainly some design blind spots which we'll run into, but I don't think they'll be show stoppingly disruptive.

As far as scaling things back, we initially had a 40 page design document of all the game systems we wanted to include in the game. We wanted crafting. A village simulation. Castle building. Custom building design. Wizard training. Creep spawners which add tower defense style play mechanics. Fog of war game mechanics, where you had to send messengers to your distant armies, etc. It all got cut. It's just too much for two people on a tight schedule. If we had more time or money, we could revisit some of these ideas and include them. But they aren't essential to the game play. How did I decide what gets cut and what doesn't? You have to sit down and ask this question for every feature in the game: If I remove this feature, do I still have the core essence of the game I'm trying to make? Our game is about magic and unit tactics in the context of a larger campaign map. A crafting system is interesting, but not the identity of the game. It can be cut. I pared the game down and pretty much wrote a bullet pointed list of game rules. It's 180 lines of text and can be used like a rule book for playing the game manually.

At the end of the day, we have to decide if we want to build and ship a game which is simple and polished and we know we can ship, or if we want to take a big risk building a really complicated game, risk not having any time to polish it, and risk not being able to properly QA it before the deadline. The differences are pretty stark, so it makes it easy to decide on a more limited feature set with more polish. If the game is well received by customers and we get sufficient cash from sales, we can look at releasing a sequel which has many more of the features I had to cut. It sucks to not be able to build the originally envisioned game, but it would have required a team of at least 15 people, 3 years, and $2.8 million to pay everyones wages and operating costs. I certainly don't have those resources laying around, so the pragmatic thing to do is cut features until the costs match my available resources.

As for the stock market: I've been invested in solar power companies and Fannie Mae. I was doing really good for a while, but this summer and fall has not been kind to my portfolio. I am probably not a very prudent investor, so I probably deserve to get burned. If I was smarter, I would have just put all of my money in a nice conservative index fund.

"If I remove this feature, do I still have the core essence of the game I'm trying to make? Our game is about magic and unit tactics in the context of a larger campaign map. A crafting system is interesting, but not the identity of the game. It can be cut. I pared the game down and pretty much wrote a bullet pointed list of game rules. It's 180 lines of text and can be used like a rule book for playing the game manually."

I'm glad that you're getting a good feel as to what your "MVP" actually is. That design was feature heavy, I wouldn't say it lacked direction, but it had a lot of moving parts that did not feel like they needed to be there (at least at first).

"solar power companies and Fannie Mae."

That's putting your eggs into 2 baskets. I think there's a middle ground between that and investing in something overly conservative. With the recession coming up, I'm considering investing in gold and gems. Historically, every recession, their value increases. Not sure whether to look into jewelry, mining, or whatnot (from experience, mining can be quite tricky!).

That being said, and to be more on topic, can't wait for your January post (if it ever comes...)