For those who didn’t catch it, it was an RTS where you just have one giant blob called ‘Economy’, and one blob called ‘Army’, and you tweak a slider to decide what percentage of your resources to devote to increasing each one. And to prevent extreme early rushes, your economy has a gun on it.

I’ve since decided it should have rudimentary fog of war, and your army should have its own sliders for unit composition. It’s basically a weaponised pie chart, and you drag sliders to determine how much of it is Rocks, Paper and Scissors.

I’m still pretty new as a games developer (mostly just doing quirky Flash games!), but I know exactly what you mean when you mentioned the “new ideas keep coming in” thing. Just to share, what I usually do is keep a separate list of future ideas, update the list when inspiration strikes, and actually FINISH the game I’m working on first.

These days, I only abandon the games when the prototype is not much fun, and this method allows me to focus on the current project without feeling like I’m missing out on a cool new idea. It’s on a list, and I’ll eventually get around to it.

Of course, you have a lot more experience than me and you probably know that already. :D

I’m kidding – only got 2 small projects under my own belt, and it is so easy to add tons and tons of essentially useless stuff onto it. Luckily, I was in charge and I love love love cutting flab. Saying ‘no’ makes me giddy.

Anyway, way to be a tease about the RTS. Though I’d love to see Gunpoint reach at least beta.

That said, prototyping is the best method I know for exploring and developing these new ideas without drawing too much time away from the main project, and Unity has allowed me to do this ten times more effectively than any engine I’ve worked with before. It’s tempting to try and work out a lot of the design on paper, but I’ve found that you really can’t predict the way the system will work out, especially if it’s a series of simple and elegant mechanics that you’re working on.

My advice is to start working more with unity and to cultivate these new ideas in the engine. It won’t take nearly as long as you might imagine and the payoff will be much greater than if you simply put them aside for the sake of the main project.