Comment by _QrE
3 months ago
> I failed to fairly evaluate my options at the start of the project.
The more projects I do, the more time I find that I dedicate to just planning things up front. Sometimes it's fun to just open a game engine and start playing with it (I too have an unfair bias in this area, but towards Godot [https://godotengine.org/]), but if I ever want to build something to release, I start with a spreadsheet.
Do you think you needed to have those times to play around in the engine? Can a beginner possibly even know what to plan for if they don't fully understand the game engine itself? I am older so I know the benefits of planning, but I sometimes find that I need to persuade myself to plan a little less, just to get myself more in tune with the idioms and behaviors of the tool I am working in.
I think even if you don't have much experience with tools, you can still plan effectively, especially now with LLMs that can give you an idea of what you're in for.
But if you're doing something for fun, then you definitely don't need much planning, if any - the project will probably be abandoned halfway through anyways :)