Streamlined production

I've spent around a year and a half working slowly (and not very steadily) on my upcoming game (the spiritual successor to This Is (NOT!) A Car Club), and if I continue in this tempo it will take years to finish. And that's not a reality I want to live in. So, to get it finished and ready for a release at the start of 2026, during the remaining months of 2025 I will:

- Work on it rarely but with focus. Every other weekend is probably enough. I need the time in between to think of ideas and reflect on what I've done (and who I've become...), and I need the singular focus to get things done. And, if I would do it more often I'd get tired of it, so this is how I can be productive without getting the backsides of it.

- Not do any side-work that just adds more work on top of the game without improving it. This mostly means marketing and other things (localization, porting to other platforms, putting out a soundtrack, writing documentation for the code, etc) where it feels like I'm working on the game but I'm actually just taking time away from the production.

- Only add content I know will work, and which I have a system and good efficient tools for adding. This is mostly:
*NPC characters with attached dialogue
*Dialogues in the linear story
*Graphical objects in the world, with or without attached dialogue
*Houses
*Terrain details in the "overworld"
This is what all the buttons in my in-game editor is for:

Because, if I want to add a whole new type of object or event, I have to program it from scratch, and programming that one thing would take the same amount of time as adding 100 NPCs, or 100 dialogue lines, or 100 house parts, etc (kind of), and that's not what I'll do in this phase. I have to be able to add content in a streamlined way by creating new variations of the same type of objects, without having to do too much context-switching.
The things I add should come from ideas I've thought about in my head for a while, and resonated back and forth whether they work technically, can be made in a reasonable time, don't affect other game parts too much, fit into the game's context, and are actually good. Trial-and-error:ing everything inside the game engine is tedious, so I avoid it as much as I can and try to do it in my head instead.

- Not do any big changes or remove anything. Because every change affects 5-15 other things in the game, which in turn affect multiple other things each, so changing even one single thing in a game system is fragile and too riskful for this phase. This means I have to think carefully before adding anything to the game (which ties back to the previous paragraph). Also, if I remove a concept from the game as soon as I don't like it anymore, I have to replace it with something else, and added up this means I'll kind of be producing several games during the project's lifetime, if you include all the content I create just to throw away. I want the content I made for the game 1,5 years ago to get used, which means I have to commit to all ideas I add and just make them work eventually, instead of giving up on them.

- Not get distracted by technical problems & design issues. I'll trust that they'll get fixed in the right time. Problems so big that production has to stop until they're fixed shouldn't appear at this stage anyway. Some day I'll wake up and think "today is the perfect day to fix all those small problems I've bumped into the last year" and fix them all in a couple of days, and I won't think or do much about them neither before or after.
This is because of several reasons: The programming brain doesn't go well together with the creative brain, and these problems appear at random times and are very distracting, which goes straight against the idea of working with focus. Problem-solving is better to do when you feel like it or when you get a sudden realization of the solution, rather than just when the problem arises and you aren't prepared for it and probably frustrated and confused. So, I just have to suppress my urge to fix problems, and learn to live with seeing all the weird inconsistensies and holes in the game every time I work on it.

- Not overanalyze things. Dreams, hopes and irrelevant worries took too much time during the last project. Instead of thinking about how cool it will be when the game is done, or about how impossible it seems to get it done, if I spend that time on producing instead the game could actually get done. (Writing this post is probably the most analyzing I'll do. I have to figure out how to produce in a streamlined way to actually do it, but then I also have to stop thinking about it.)

Summarized, I'll focus on streamlined production and leave all other distractions and roadblocks aside for ca 3 months, no matter how important or unimportant they are. I have all ideas, and now I need to get them together to a full thing. The main point here is that you can't really be a creative production company (or creative production person?) if you focus too much on irrelevant things, like technology or marketing, or on anticipating how your work will be received.

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