Game design is hard, especially if you're just starting out, especially if you're expecting to have to do it all by yourself, especially if... the list goes on and on. So I'm making this post for myself.
From about 4:28 to 6:40, Tom Happ gives some insight into his creative process. Transcript as follows:
"I'd say to myself, like, 'This is just gonna be so much work.' Like, I envisioned the mountain of work that it takes to continue with this for another 4 years or however long it might have taken.
"So, I think, like, I made this mental adjustment where, like, I figured out, if I can make sure that whatever I'm currently working at is enjoyable and gives me good feedback from day to day, and then I could just keep that on repeat until I'm done, it would be a lot more doable. So I would be like, I planned it out, and that's kind of how I came up with this process of, where I would do the environments first and then do the animations, and then do another thing and not go back and forth, because you know exactly what you're gonna do next, and you can be thinking like, 'I have more of these ideas for what I'm gonna do tomorrow,' and you get better at it as you go, as you do that one thing.
"That kept me from ever getting into a point where I'm like, 'Ah, man, I'm slogging through, uh, you know, collision physics, and I still have to do all the art for, like, eight more areas of the game that are huge.' Whereas this was more like, 'Okay, I'm done with all the environment art, now I have the monsters.' If I ever felt like, 'Ah, man, there's too many monsters in this,' I could be like, 'but all the environment art is done, I can just slap that right in there and it's ready to go.' It kind of, like, built on itself, you know what I mean? The further you went, the more pieces you had and the more easier [sic] it was gonna get when you get to the final stage and you're doing the level design.
"The game is almost its own thing, you know, its own entity, outside of me, as opposed to, like, something I designed, even though I did design it. It started to feel less and less like something I was just putting together in a way that happened to make sense, and more to be like something that, it was kind of happening and I was just reporting on what I saw or thought, you know?"
