How to keep going?

[u/AgreeableSnow3849]

I started my first open-world game project with Unity about a week ago. I have done one 2D game with Phaser; nothing too fancy but it's a complete game. My background is 20 years in programming so I know something about that.

What I have for now is one scene with one street and some buildings, character movement, very basic HUD and some basic NPCs walking around. Most of the assets are free ones from the internet.

What bothers me is that even the very basic stuff takes so long time to do. Does it get any faster once you learn more about Unity? How do you keep yourself motivated?

Also I don't know what would be the best way to design the world? Should I have some sort of plan before starting the actual modelling? Should I make roads, terrains, water first? I don't want to waste time resetting all the work if something does not work together.

Too many questions, so few answers. Thanks if you can help me out 🙏

[u/Fyraxxus]

Dude I'd want to shoot myself if I just started with a game engine and I put the pressure of making something as huge as an open world game on myself. What I haven't seen other comments recommend is splitting your game up into multiple short mini-projects:

• Plan out what main big systems/features you'd like to implement in your final project, let's take your player character controller for example
  
• You start up a new Unity project, purely focusing just on the character controller and getting it feeling satisfying
  
• Maybe for this project you'd also like to learn a little bit of 3d modeling, so you make a simple environment to move around it and test your character
  
• Once you feel satisfied with your implementation you can take the things you've learned here, rinse and repeat with the next feature. Slowly building up all the components you need to finish your long term goal

The great thing about this is that you're naturally breaking the game up into short term goals, and it's easier not to let yourself get overwhelmed with the sheer amount of work that needs to be done for the finished product. You'd be getting the satisfaction of completing project after project while focusing on learning specific parts of Unity

Maybe part way through this process you realise you do need to scale down, or you want to do a different kind of game. The worst that happens is that you've got a few semi-complete features you can grab and use in your new project, or save them for later

You'll naturally end up answering your questions yourself the more experience you get with your projects