I decided on developing the game with GameMaker, after watching some comparison videos of different engines (like Unity, Godot, etc.) like this one from Emeral:
The engine seems fit for a 2D-game and has a nice GUI. Also, the publishing for different platforms seems to be not as complicated as with other engines.
As a first protoype or MVP (minimal viable product), I wrote down the most basic form of the gameplay loop and designed the UI to control this gameplay loop in Miro. By definition, the MVP is as crude and small as possible, and you can see this in the image below.
For me this was less about testing if the concept works and more about testing GameMaker and my ability to program in it.
On the first day I managed for my game to look like this:
This must look shockingly bad or like not a lot to most people, but I was really proud about it. Not only did I manage to set up a game that actually runs (which in programming I feel like is one of the hardest parts), the money meter was able to be controlled by some buttons and the timer in the top-right corner counted up through the weeks, months and years in a logical way. Not bad for a first day’s work!
After about a week of developing this prototype on the side I was able to build my main gameplay loop in its entirety:
I even created my first data structure and was able to sort produced albums into charts:
Now again, this doesn’t seem like a lot, but it proved to me, that I was able to build a game in GameMaker. It wasn’t really fun yet, but there was logic behind it based on the quality of production, the trends of the genre that changed over time and some (I think) clever pseudo-randomization of certain values. Again: it wasn’t a fun game yet, but it was a game. And for me, that was good enough for this first MVP.