Heya! My name is Miloš and I'm a game developer from Bosnia who works and lives in Germany. I do all my creative work under pseudonym BRANE. I've published my first game in 2016 so I've probably dabbled in gamedev for at least 10 years now. In the last two years I've decided to take it seriously and create my first commercial game, a chess career simulator called Master of Chess.
I'm a big fan of Football Manager game. I love the complexity and deep simulation. So I thought, how would FM for chess work? I should make a game! I've been on an adventure ever since then. Turns out, there's not much in common between chess and football. Surprise!
The development journey's been an amazing ride. I started the game as an experiment and pivoted relatively early from a fully simulated experience to more involved chess play. From there it grew and grew. The pieces started slowly fitting together and after two years I've managed to finalize a project good enough for Early Access release.
I've picked Godot engine for this game and there wasn't much of a debate for me. I use it from Godot 2 (and now it's Godot 4) and I was quite experienced with UI work in Godot. And UI is all that my game is about so I've never had second thoughts. I can confidently say that was a good decision.
I work on my game around my 9-5 software developer job. So it's tricky to organize yourself. Other hurdles include mistakes I made as a game designer and programmers. Some features weren't thought out completely and now irk me. The game lacks some focus from game design perspective and it suffers from tiny bit of performance issues which I'm slowly removing.
I'd recommend playing a lot of games. I'd recommend reading a lot. I'd reiterate the advice everyone gives: start small. It might seem like your game would only work if it is of some imaginary size but 9 times out of 10 it is not the case. Great games can be very small. There's plenty evidence out there. Great games usually do one thing really good. Bad games usually do many things averagely. My game suffers from this as well, it isn't clear in what it wants to be (are you a chess player manager or a chess player?).
I'd recommend looking after your health and going for consistency. Work every day.
-Yes, keep working on your craft. The craft is making games. It is hard and it is complicated but that's where the joy comes from. Keep making games and keep improving the craft and we'll get there.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2248900/Master_of_Chess/
❤️
