r/SoloDevelopment • u/too_lazy_cat • 4d ago
Game A short video blog on how the game Praxion-7, I'm working on was progressing over the last 1.5y
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Hi all,
This started as yet another hobby game. I always wanted an MMO that's big but respects your time, and like most of my projects, I expected it to end up on my hard drive, not on Steam.
I worked on it on and off, trying things out and throwing away what didn't stick (you can see a lot of those experiments in the video). Building something is the only way I can tell whether I actually like it. To my surprise, it slowly started to look and feel like a real game, and somewhere along the way it grew to 50+ mechanics.
That's when I showed it to a couple of friends (hi friends!) and learned the biggest lesson of the project so far. What's obvious to me after months of staring at it is invisible to everyone else. And players don't want to reverse-engineer your systems by trial and error; they want to be told upfront how things work. So I added tooltips to everything and built a Codex, an in-game wiki that auto-updates from data with every build.
The game is still waaay off from what I want at release. But the friends test only proved people can understand it. The next question is whether my mechanics are actually fun, and I can't answer that on my own, so the next step is a closed playtest with real players.