I haven't made any actual development-focused dev diaries here, and given that the original teaser trailer said the game would be released in December of last year, you might reasonably wondering what on earth is going on behind the scenes. I'd like to give some kind of explanation here, but we're going to need to start with

I SHOULD MAKE A QUICK LITTLE GAME JUST TO FINISH SOMETHING

I don't know how many times a project of mine has begun with this statement, and then quickly spiraled out of control. My fundamental problem is that I don't want to make quick little games. If I come up with an idea that I like, it's almost guaranteed that scope creep will set in and it will stop being a quick project; and if I don't like the idea enough for scope creep to happen then I'm not going to stay motivated long enough to finish the project.

Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars began as a miniscule project, basically a RISK clone with a conspiracy theory theme. Then I came up with the idea to have Agent units running around wrecking things behind enemy lines. Even explaining it in those terms makes it sound like more of a thing than it would have been, but within that concept was the seed of all of the scope creep that would lead to something that was meant to be a one-month project become a yearlong project with launch nowhere in sight.

THE BEST WAY TO LOSE A YEAR OF WORK IS A FEW MONTHS AT A TIME

The thing that's cost me the most time, though, is not actually the scope creep. If I had decided back in October or November of last year that the scope of the project would be exactly what it is today, I would probably have launched by now. The problem is that to get to where I am today, the game had to go through a few iterations - and I also had to teach myself how to make a Grand Strategy game.

The original game map, created to accommodate Agent, G-Men, Terrorist, and Bureaucrat units all moving around on it, would have been 80x48 tiles, the same size as a standard map in Civ 4. The problem is that, as you can see by these surviving screenshots from that era in development, that's not remotely enough detail to portray the Earth's geography with any acceptable level of detail. Unfortunately, I spent a long time committed to this map size, and wasted a lot of work hours figuring out per-tile population levels.

Something that isn't obvious, if you've never tried to make a strategy game like this, is how much of the development process is actually tool development. That is, you can't just "develop the game," you have to also make the tools you're going to use to make the content for the game. In the course of developing Silent Weapons, I have created three different scenario editors that I then had to discard as no longer fit for purpose as the design of the game changed.

You might be thinking that the obvious solution is to just get the systems of the game into place, and then develop the content creation tools, and the problem with that is that it's hard to know if your systems are any good without creating some test content for them, and if you need to create test content, you might as well do the tool development alongside the system development. This pressure only got worse after I made a design choice that game data would be saved in a format that made the game much more flexible to updating, but made the data far less human-readable. Before that, creating test data was as easy as editing some values in a nice-looking spreadsheet. The problem was that if I wanted to change what data was being stored, I'd have to completely re-format the spreadsheet. The new system is much more resilient, but it means I absolutely have to make content-creation tools.

Tools development is an aspect of game development that doesn't get much love, but it's incredibly important. Unfortunately, it's not something that directly affects the end user (unless they're released as modding tools - and I do intend to do that), so they aren't worth sharing as development progress, so working on content tools and then throwing them out is a really good way to go months without making any visible progress - to say nothing of the content made with those tools which was also thrown out.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

I am now at a place where I am fully committed to a concrete vision of the project, I know exactly what this game is going to be, and I have a pretty good idea of how I'm going to accomplish it. All of those things deserve their own blog posts, so I'm going to leave things here for now. 

For the time being, you can help to support the game by wishlisting it on Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1225880/?curator_clanid=4777282&utm_source=SteamD... You'll always be able to buy it and play it here, but if you want to support the project, Steam wishlists supposedly boost its visibility, on a much higher traffic storefront.