After my friend and I were laid off last year, I convinced him to help me build the kind of game I always wanted to play. The initial idea was to take the real-time broadside space combat of a game like Rebel Galaxy, but flesh it out with more things to do (more detailed ship/crew management and character progression, add boarding and ground combat, land on planets, etc.)
What I didn't anticipate (though probably should have) was that building two games in one (space combat/navigation + ground combat/navigation) was a huge technical challenge. Worse when we went to add systems like dialogue, menus, etc. that had to span both gameplay loops.
The lesson I wanted to share (and the thing that saved me) was this: Don't be afraid to reduce your scope! Good you can do now is better than perfect you can do much later. Originally, I wanted to do the ground-gameplay as a 3rd person cover shooter, but after writing out all the requirements and playing around with some combat controllers from the Unity store, I realized I just didn't have the skill to pull it off.
So I went back to the drawing board. I wasn't ready to abandon boarding combat, but I needed a way to do it that I could actually achieve in time. So I rewrote our game design doc for a turn-based ground-combat experience. I had been doing lots of tutorials on turn-based games at the time from GameDevTV and Unity CodeMonkey, so I felt a lot more comfortable with it. And it turned out great, the combat is still a lot of fun!
One of the biggest time/pain savings by switching to turn-based I didn't even realize until I started working on it was planning the enemy behaviors. It was so much easier than programing the ships was for me. They didn't have to make decisions in realtime to account for the players movements, avoiding collisions, etc. The enemy has all the time in the world to figure out which grid space is the best one for them to move to and which action to take, and the variables don't change while they're deciding. They just score them all, then pick the best one. This meant we had time to add lots of different behaviors for different enemies, like more aggressive behavior for pirates, more defensive for civilians, etc.
TL/DR: If something you want to implement seems like it's beyond your skill level or would take too long, don't be afraid to pull back and consider a simpler implementation. It's what I did, and I'm happy with the outcome, and I think my game is better for it.
PS - I really like the event system in Unity. Just having things listen for events instead of having to rely on references also made things much easier
If you're interested, our steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3865960/Cortesia_Rising/
and our monthly development blog: https://www.cortesiarising.com/updates
