HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY BEEN
After I finished Attack of the Karens, it didn’t really do that well, so I knew I wanted to try a new genre. I studied indie game marketing a lot which led me to do some market research on which games are doing well on Steam. Simulation games are doing well right now (and traditionally have done well on PC for a long time), so I decided to make a game in that direction. After studying games in my goal revenue bracket by buying and playing them, I decided on a game where you build out an area and manage shops.
Early on, the game was going to be quite different. It was going to be something like a shopping mall where you move in stores and watch people shop there, but I decided to change the theme to boardwalk because there aren’t very many boardwalk-specific games on Steam, and there already were a few mall tycoon sims like Another Brick in the Mall and Mall Craze.
I think development has been a bit slower than I would have liked. Going from a shoot ‘em up genre to a simulation genre required me to really re-think how to code a game. In shoot ‘em ups, everything deals with colliders and the code is a little simpler. There’s a lot of fast-moving particle effects and a linear approach to design and player progression. In a simulator game, it’s a sandbox. You need to program systems that can always interact with each other, and account for endless combinations of what the player will do, so it requires you to approach development in a different way. Saving and loading data is also a lot more complicated than it was for my previous game.
Despite all of that, I have developed Boardwalk Builders much faster than Attack of the Karens. AotK took me nearly a year to get to the point of having a trailer and Steam page. I’m there in just over 6 months with BB. I think it just boils down to being more experienced the second time around and being more disciplined in constantly working on the game, where with AotK I wasn’t as disciplined and would get burnt out easily.
