HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY BEEN
The journey has been pretty rocky to tell the truth. Isle of Swaps was initially a small open world with the intent to collect all the cards in the fictional Critter Card TCG by swapping your cards with other characters. It was intended as a cosy collectathon with some quick auto battles.
Unfortunately I couldn't get many content creators to cover it in the first 6 months, so i either continued a potential losing battle or pivoted to a roguelite deckbuilder which I'd had experience with before. This meant stripping out the open world and dialogue and focusing on making the battles more tactical and adding way more cards.
Personally, I was disappointed to make the change, having a low stakes collectathon would've been a relaxing few hours but the game has garnered more attention as a full deckbuilder roguelite.
Another drain has been doing the illustrations for the cards. The game has about 400 cards, with the hired artists doing about 70 of those. I'm left with 80 smaller icons and and about 250 proper illustrations to do (though some are reused). This is the most 2D art I've done over the last 13 years but I'd say my art has definitely improved over this time!