TypingTycoon

Original description 

Support the Kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/typingtycoon/typing-tycoon In this unique typing-based game, you generate money by typing out words. Everything is available for purchase,  upgrade or purchase new words to boost your earnings and efficiency. Originally created for Yogscast Games' Jingle Game Jam under the theme "Everything Has a Cost," this smaller-scale version is a prototype for a future idle game I'm planning to make.     

After Kickstarter thoughts / postmortem

Looking back on this project, it taught me more about the realities of game development than almost anything else I’ve made.

This was a solo project I created over winter break for a game jam with the theme “Everything Has a Cost.” I like trying a new genre for each game jam, so this time I made an idle typing game where you type words to earn money and buy upgrades.

One of the biggest things I learned is how much organization matters. At the time, I was pretty unorganized, and reopening the project later was a complete mess. Honestly, I’m surprised I was able to expand it as much as I did. I relied pretty heavily on Unity Asset Store tools and add-ons, which is not a bad thing on its own, but I was not organizing those files well at all. That made the whole project harder to manage, and the problem only got worse once I started trying to grow the game beyond its original scope.

Since I had not planned from the start to turn it into a larger project, adding new features became a headache. The file structure was messy, and the code was not very flexible. A lot of values were not easy to adjust in the Inspector, which made development more frustrating than it needed to be. Because I was working on it every day, I could still keep track of how most of it worked, but it would have been difficult for anyone else to jump in and help.

On the project management side, I also learned that this was probably not the best project for me to try to fully scale up at that point in my life. The game relied a lot on atmosphere, which meant it needed strong, cohesive art. Since art is not one of my strengths, I had a hard time finding enough open-use assets that matched well. That is a big part of why the Kickstarter goal ended up being around $2,000, with most of that going toward art and the cost of launching on Steam. While I did raise a fair amount, it was still far from the full goal.

In the future, I think I would approach something like this very differently. Instead of aiming for a larger budget, I would rather launch a project with a much smaller goal, closer to $200, where the funding mostly covers Steam release costs and art is a much lower priority.

Even with all the roadblocks, this project still means a lot to me. It was one of my first real experiences with people being excited about something I made, and that made it feel special. Even though it did not go the way I originally hoped, it taught me a lot about planning, scope, organization, and what it really takes to grow a prototype into something bigger.