Don't lose sight of what your game is supposed to be.

Just posted some thoughts on vision holders on reddit, here: https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/n20ryv/vision_holders_are_important_d...

If you don't wanna pop over to reddit to see it, here's what it says: 

Hello everyone!

I've been working on a student game as part of my degree for about a year and a half now. I've filled in for a lot of roles, but I've mostly acted as the systems designer. It's been a really long road with a lot of setbacks and changes, but that's to be expected, especially in the work from home era. However, one of our biggest setbacks has been our variance from what the game was originally supposed to be.

Don't get me wrong -- games change through development. That's a natural part of the process as playtesting occurs and feedback is given. However, how you change your game in response to these is critical. Our game, Matter of Great Import, was meant to rely on the spinning plates model of gameplay. There's supposed to be many things for the player to attempt to balance at once, making the gameplay difficult and interesting. However, our vision holder had to be less involved in the process than we thought, and as such we ended up effectively going without one for most of development.

This resulted in us making changes in the wrong direction too many times. When we were getting consistent feedback that the game felt slow, we struggled to find the solution. I kept making tweaks to the numbers but nothing was working, and the systems were growing more needlessly complex. Eventually, we came upon the idea of adding minigames to supplement the down time in the game. While this sounded like a great idea because it did technically address the issue, it was way out of the vision for our game. This resulted in a lot of wasted time and effort, as it took us far too long to realize the mistake.

Since then, I've done a heavy re-evaluation of the systems and they're in a much better place now, despite being very simplified. We've got a very long way to go still as a result of us losing sight of what we wanted the game to be. But we're excited to continue working on it and improving it! If you wanna check it out, it's at https://sirveylance.itch.io/matter-of-great-import!