Things I learned solo developing a game
Disclaimer
These are all my personal learnings and may or may not apply to any other person.
1. Inspiration is mostly harmful
The initial dose of inspiration that sparks a bunch of ideas that I can then take and work on is tremendously important. It could be something I've seen in nature or a game I've played recently. However, consuming similar media to the one I am creating to find solutions to design issues or ideas to implement is not very helpful at all. I find that it poisons the quality of the original ideas I have or may have had. It also triggers a comparison reflex in my head, and as we all know, comparison is the thief of joy. I think the best strategy is to distance myself from similar media as far as possible after the initial surge of inspiration.
2. Finding the right amount of consistency
As Stephen Vizinczey said, consistency is a virtue for trains. Even though he was talking about philosophy, I think it applies to design and programming work too. It's not always possible to be truly productive and solve hard problems, say, at 8:00 every day, at least for me. The solution is not so clear to me though, as working whenever the brain feels like it also doesn't feel great. Not that it would be a problem from a productivity or time-management perspective, but not being bound to a routine does unpleasant things to my brain. I suppose the right balance is somewhere in the middle, but I haven't truly found it yet.
3. Don't overdo it with innovation
I severely underestimated how tiring it is to invent completely new mechanics for a game. Not only are they tricky to design in a fun way because you are doing it without any reference, it's also a wild guess as to know whether people will enjoy them without having access to a hefty amount of playtesters. In hindsight, it's probably more optimal for a solo-developed game to have a small to medium amount of innovation grounded in other, more conventional mechanics.
4. Avoid becoming your project
There were times while working on the game when I would be feeling seriously upset if I didn't manage to implement a feature, and elated when I did. This is what I call "becoming your project" and it's tremendously unhelpful for both work and mental health. It's difficult to avoid this toxic relationship with your project if you truly care about it. As far as I can tell, the most effective way to avoid this issue is to remember to be a real person outside of the project, have hobbies you also truly care about, talk to friends, work on mindfulness, and remember to zoom out.
5. Try out a lot of different things before committing
Due to my particular situation, I didn't have as much time as I would have wished to select the project I'm going to commit to. As a result, I'm not entirely sure I made the game that I myself really love. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy playing it, and I genuinely think it's a good game (to the extent that I can rate my own game), but I probably would have made something closer to my heart given another chance to think it through.
6. Consider your playtesting prospects
This one is going to directly contradict the previous point in which I suggest making a game for yourself, but I never promised this list would make any sense. Let's face it, unless you are famous, or have a lot of money, it will be hard to do live playtesting with the correct audience. Yes, you can do playtesting with randos from Reddit, but that's hardly the same quality. Therefore, it would be a good idea to make a game such that your friends are the target audience (I didn't), which will give you easy access to quality playtesters. This may not apply if you suspect that your friends are not honest or would sugarcoat feedback.
7. Banish regrets
This is not so much a learning, but a word of encouragement, for myself and anyone who can relate. As you can see, I messed up quite a few things, but this post is not called "mistakes I made developing a solo game". After all, mistakes are just learnings in disguise! I have also done a lot of things correctly, but those are not worth writing about, because there is not much to learn from those. Could the game be even better had I done everything correctly and the development process had gone a lot smoother? Well, of course, but there is no point thinking about that. The only thing to be done is to learn and do better next time.
Shameless self-plug
If all this made you curious about the game in question, you can find it here. It's almost finished and the demo will come out soonTM